Coursework- yuck!

Well surgery is still going well, who would have thought you could have so much fun cutting up people! It takes an insane amount of training to become a good surgeon though. You really have to practice your skills. When you've cut stuff up, you eventually need to sew it back together (suturing). To make sure the sutures don't come up the surgeon ties special knots in the suture material to make sure they stay where they're supposed to. There are many different kinds of surgical knots to learn, and all of them look crazily hard. You can just see the surgeons fingers flipping around super fast and suddenly a knot appears!

At the same time as learning some surgery I am also doing a bit of coursework. It's called the community follow-up project (CFU). Essentially, you find an interesting in-patient in the hospital, you go up to them, annoy them for half an hour asking them about their illness, and then you leave them alone. Until they go home! Then you have to go and visit your patient in the community at their house! It's all about finding out what life is like for patients when they leave hospital, and how they cope with their new diseases or chronic diseases etc. It's sort of interesting but as with most courseworks and touchy feely stuff you end up having to just jump through a bunch of stupid hoops. And i'm crap at jumping- so I usually do miserably in this kind of stuff!

Ah well, at least I go to see some trauma surgery this week!! Makes it all worthwhile......

Surgery!

Yes! And about time too! Finally after 3 years at medical school this week I finally got to go into surgery and have some fun! Surgeons are definitely very different to medics. The doctors in medicine are all very touchy feely and they take ages chattings about how patients feel etc! Then you see a surgeon and they're very much more clipped and economical with their time! Some of the ward rounds when I was doing endocrine medicine took 4 hours! The surgery ones take about 30 mins sometimes!

Being in theatre is awesome! If you want to get close to the patient you have to 'scrub up'. This basically involves washing your hands lots and then putting on a pair of gloves without touching the outsides of them (harder than it sounds) and also putting on a gown over your scrubs! It all looks a bit crazy when you're doing it and kind of funny (especially if you're crap at it like me). On my first day in surgery I saw some general surgery which comprised 3 operations, each one fixing some hernias. A hernia is when a bit of bowel accidentally pokes through the abdominal wall or some other bit of fascia and makes a big bulge. So, rather simply, the surgeon has to just poke the bit of bowel back through the hole it came through and then sew up the hole!

Surgery seems to be simple then hey?