Well I'm on my Senior Surgery rotation and I'm bored which is a dangerous situation for me because my first instinct is to stir up trouble to get a little action around here (as noted before). But my mind is blank... for the most part (talking politics never gets anyone anywhere).
Gosh I'm bored. Not a cotton-pickin thing is goin' on. Don't have a test to study for, no reason to start studying for the step 3 'cause it's way too early... can't play games on my pocket PC 'cause the residents will get pissed...
... this is pathetic...
well i'm on my MS3 surgery rotation, and i was bored stiff until yesterday morning. some days just aren't like the others . . .
i had come into the hospital under threat of being failed in my surgery rotation for not going to morning report. same goes with my friends. we got chewed out by the chief of our ward (who quite honestly looks and behaves rather akin to lucifer himself) for missing morning report . . .
anyway, thats how the day started. stressed as we were about this, we tried to find our tutor in the emergency department to tell him about it, when he says "i'm busy. there was an explosion in Dimona. get down here." so off we go . . .
"explosion?" we ask, "what kind of explosion are we talking about?"
"terrorist attack" he says. "we have 11 coming from Dimona"
so we glove up and wait for the ambulances to deliver the victims. in the meantime, the emergency room is crazy, but the outside of the hospital is simply an absolute zoo . .. full of media (just like you see in the movies), lots of security, and hundreds of staff and civilian onlookers. and when those ambulances start pulling up one by one, and you see these poor people on their stretchers, covered with blood, being frantically escorted through a sea of staff and media - some in worse shape than others - you immediately know you are a medical student on your surgery rotation because you're supposed to be there, but you don't have the first damn clue as to what to do. but you assert what you DO know and do your best to help. so in no time we start primary assessments of several patients. THIS is when you learn about clinical medicine . . . when you do/see rapid work-ups of 5 trauma victims (from a ****ing bomb no less) in less than 10 minutes, in the presence of the stress of the scenario and the cries of agony of the victims . . you learn more in one minute than you can learn in a month of reading books.
eventually me and my friends were able to migrate out of the emergency room and to the trauma room where a man was brought in with the majority of his abdominal contents protruding through a 12" diameter hole in his side, and an arm nearly missing. i.e. his intestnes were hanging out of his body, while he cried and screamed in agony. Through a small line-of-sight between the shoulders and heads of all of the people that are working around him, frantically doing what they can and preparing him for trauma surgery, i make eye contact with this poor man while he is conscious. He was telling me with his eyes how sorry he is that this happened to him, how sorry he was for anything bad he had done in his life, pleading with me to save him, hoping for relief. i'm a bit hypnotized at this moment, because i don't know whether to find his bloody hand to hold, or silently mouth the words in hebrew to say that "everything's OK" . . . which i'm glad i didn't, because things most certainly were not OK . . . piercing through that brief hypnosis, awakening me to my duties, i hear: "hold this . . . HOLD THE ****ING INTESTNES!"
Oh ****! ok ok, i got them . . . we packed them in and headed for the OR. after scrubbing in we stayed in the OR, exploring the abdominal and the thoracic cavities for upwards to 2 hours until the bleeding stopped and he was closed up. throughout the whole surgery, tensions were high and tempers raged. surgeons yelled and nurses panicked . . .and medical students all gathered around, vying for the best seats in the theatre (beside my friend, i had the best position). it was a lot more comfortable than being in the actual ED at this point in time
when all was closed and the main surgeon was through, we pulled off our gowns and masks, paused for a second . . . and then someone said "lets get some coffee" . . . we all nodded silently and walked away
and that was my morning. hope yours was a little more peaceful . . .
