Surgery: Day 1

A brief intro for the Medical Mondays folk: I'm a third year medical student in an M.D. program in Michigan and I'll be graduating in May of 2014. I worked as an ER nurse for two years prior to medical school and was largely motivated to go to medical school by volunteer work that I did in Ecuador and Haiti. I'm a newlywed as of August 2014 to a wonderfully supportive husband (he's a firefighter/paramedic) and started my blog a few months ago where I blog for fun (and a creative outlet!) about style and newlywed life, and occasionally about medical school.

So I found this really awesome link-up, Medical Mondays, and I had all sorts of plans to write some really deep, inspiring post on medical school and how it's changed me and what I've learned etc. etc. Instead, I just got home from my first day of my general surgery rotation and 10 hours in the OR, I'm on trauma call tonight (crossing my fingers that I do not get called in, even though it is probably inevitable), and I have to be back tomorrow morning at 5 a.m. to pre-round on the ICU patients that my attending assigned me today. I also woke up this morning with a cold on top of the still-lurking bronchitis from my pediatrics rotation (I was sniffling all day under my OR mask). So since I'm not feeling very deep or inspired, I'm just going to share a random recap of general surgery Day 1.

6:45 a.m.: Arrive for orientation, cough and sniffle and cough some more while the surgery director talks about how hard surgery is, how bad the hours are, how we will not pass if we slack, how hard surgery is again.

7:55 a.m.: Surgery director finishes talking about how hard surgery is and sends us off to find our surgery attending that we are assigned to for the week.

8:05 a.m. I find my attending physician in OR 5 and watch him doing a laparoscopic hernia repair through the OR window. I don't know whether to go in since they are in the middle of a surgery. OR aide tells me to go in. Attending physician then tells me that I better have a really good excuse for not being there earlier.

9 a.m. Patient comes for a breast surgery and attending quizzes me on stats from a recent study on breast cancer and then is astonished that I have not read the study yet. I assure him that I will read it.

10 a.m. - 2 p.m. Several rectal surgeries reinforce my lack of desire to go into general surgery.

3 p.m. Patient comes for abdominal surgery with a completely open abdominal wound. I am again reminded of why I don't want to be a surgeon.

3:30 p.m. Attending physician quizzes me on anatomy on the abdominal wound patient. I have no idea. He then tells me that it's impossible to distinguish any anatomy since the bowel is so distorted (and I feel 100x better).

3:45 p.m. Attending surgeon splashes me by accident with fluid from said open abdominal wound. It just misses my face and lands on my gown.

5 p.m. We finish the day's surgeries. Attending physician gives me a blank order to sheet to write orders for our most recent patient (and then leaves before I can tell him that I'm really not sure of what orders to write).

5:30 p.m. I round on more patients that my attending assigned me in the I.C.U. before he left.

I am now sitting at home reading about Nissen fundoplications (tomorrow's first surgery), sniffling, and praying that my pager doesn't go off. I will say though, that I've been dreading my general surgery rotation for a long time and today wasn't that bad. I guess that's the pro of expecting the worst?

We shall see what Day #2 will bring...