Med Student in the house!
So after 4 days off of my surgery rotation for a conference in rural medicine, I am returned refreshed and ready to go. My call karma has been restored to it's natural place in the universe (namely so I get some sleep). And I may even be able to take my car into the "car doctor" today! Only took a month and a half!
The conference was up in the northern part of this province in a town of about 20,000 people. Not the prettiest of towns, but hospitable and friendly. The conference itself was great because after rotating through 3rd year, I knew what was going on in the sessions! Yea me! Most of all it was nice to get a break from the city and from school. For a weekend, I got a taste of what non-med people do on the weekends! One of the doctors there was kind enough to give us his SUV for the weekend so we took advantage of that and went for a drive to another town. Beautiful scenery! This province rocks!
Yesterday, I made a bit of a goof of myself...newbie mistake, but lesson learned! I spent the morning in the operating room doing breast lumpectomies (taking cancer out). On one case we were doing a 'sentinal node biopsy' which is where we isolate the main lymph node that drains the breast to see if cancer has spread there. We do it 2 fold: 1) inject radioactive solution into the breast and use a geiger counter to isolate the lymph node, and 2) inject blue dye into the breast so we can see where it drains. These 2 ways together improve the accuracy of finding the sentinal node. As we were prepping the patient, I thought I would be a good med student and help out a bit. I was going to draw up the blue dye into a syringe so we could inject it into the patient. I had done this act a bazillion times before when we draw up local anesthetics for suturing. So I put the needle together, pulled back on the syringe, inserted the needle into the vial, injected air into the vial (all of which we were taught to do), and tried to get the blue dye into the syringe. The next thing I know is that blue dye is spraying out of the bottle, onto the floor, onto my hands and fingers, onto pretty much everything in a 3 foot radius. The surgeon and nurses were laughing at me. They failed to tell me that you should NEVER inject air into the vial for this very reason!!!!! Now I have blue fingernails and a blue palm. The surgeon was good about it (I think I gave him a laugh!) and said that "at least I got involved in the case and I have the proof!" Nice. Lesson #1: don't inject air into blue dye bottles. On a good note, the surgeon complimented me on my suturing skills. (Yea me!)
I was on call last night.
# pages from the ward: 1 (for yep, you guessed it...low urine output)
# consults from emerg: zero
# times I got up to check pager just to make sure I didn't miss a page: 10
total sleep time: 7 hours
Call karma restored!
The conference was up in the northern part of this province in a town of about 20,000 people. Not the prettiest of towns, but hospitable and friendly. The conference itself was great because after rotating through 3rd year, I knew what was going on in the sessions! Yea me! Most of all it was nice to get a break from the city and from school. For a weekend, I got a taste of what non-med people do on the weekends! One of the doctors there was kind enough to give us his SUV for the weekend so we took advantage of that and went for a drive to another town. Beautiful scenery! This province rocks!
Yesterday, I made a bit of a goof of myself...newbie mistake, but lesson learned! I spent the morning in the operating room doing breast lumpectomies (taking cancer out). On one case we were doing a 'sentinal node biopsy' which is where we isolate the main lymph node that drains the breast to see if cancer has spread there. We do it 2 fold: 1) inject radioactive solution into the breast and use a geiger counter to isolate the lymph node, and 2) inject blue dye into the breast so we can see where it drains. These 2 ways together improve the accuracy of finding the sentinal node. As we were prepping the patient, I thought I would be a good med student and help out a bit. I was going to draw up the blue dye into a syringe so we could inject it into the patient. I had done this act a bazillion times before when we draw up local anesthetics for suturing. So I put the needle together, pulled back on the syringe, inserted the needle into the vial, injected air into the vial (all of which we were taught to do), and tried to get the blue dye into the syringe. The next thing I know is that blue dye is spraying out of the bottle, onto the floor, onto my hands and fingers, onto pretty much everything in a 3 foot radius. The surgeon and nurses were laughing at me. They failed to tell me that you should NEVER inject air into the vial for this very reason!!!!! Now I have blue fingernails and a blue palm. The surgeon was good about it (I think I gave him a laugh!) and said that "at least I got involved in the case and I have the proof!" Nice. Lesson #1: don't inject air into blue dye bottles. On a good note, the surgeon complimented me on my suturing skills. (Yea me!)
I was on call last night.
# pages from the ward: 1 (for yep, you guessed it...low urine output)
# consults from emerg: zero
# times I got up to check pager just to make sure I didn't miss a page: 10
total sleep time: 7 hours
Call karma restored!
posted by MSI (Med Student Intern) @ 8:38 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home