Just watch a surgery!
I'm shadowing an Orthopedic PA right now and he assists on surgeries and let me watch them work today! So I had to get up at 6:30am and drive down to Payson. They gave me scrubs to change into, got some booties for my feet, a cap for my head, and off I went. I watched two total knee replacement surgeries. Two hours per surgery. I was kinda tired at the end (I also got no sleep the past two days) but it was so awesome!! I was at the head, so I got to see a lot of it which was awesome. It's crazy, they use this computer and laser stuff to get a picture of the knee on the screen then use it to make sure the knee is as balanced as they can get it, then there's tons of drilling and pounding and shaving off bone and cutting bone and cauterizing and all sorts of stuff. It's not very bloody, but there's lots of drilling and cutting of bone. The cauterizing smells bad, but not too bad, but I keep smelling it now and I wonder if the smell stuck on me. Then they fit it with metal parts and use this weird cement stuff to stick it on (which I'll tangent about in a second) and sew it back up!
The cement stuff is cool. They gave me a ball of it and told me to play around with it. It takes about 15 minutes to get hard, and it gets super super hot while it does so. So I had to toss it from hand to hand so I didn't burn myself. Then it was rock hard! Sweet stuff man.
On the second surgery, the anesthesiologist described to me everything he was doing while prepping the patient, which was way nice of him. He showed me how to intubate someone which is so scary and I'm scared to do it in the future! He did it so easily though...
The PA didn't do too much, he assisted and then stitched up at the end, but I wonder how other surgeries are, like cardiothoracic or abdominal. I wonder how they utilize their PAs. It made me rethink if I want to do surgery or not. I bet ER medicine would be sweet. Right now my number one pick is still infectious disease though. I know I know, I just want to be House. Ha.
Anyways-- I feel great! What a high. Medicine is so freaking cool.
2 comments:
Luckyyyyyyyy!!!! I just ate so I don't know if I handled that explanation as well as I thought I would. I was really hoping I could stomach it . . . but it made me feel sick. Maybe it's because whenever I hear about knee stuff it makes me think of it happening to MY knees which we all know are pooptastic. So yeah. I would never be able to handle doing surgery/medicine.
You are a braver soul than I am! I would have fainted. Not even joking. But I'm glad that you like it so much.
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