Transplant Surgery!

Finally something truly awesome! The main hospital in Cambridge is called Addenbrooke's (spelt right??) and it's a monster, an ugly monster. However, despite is aesthetic deficiencies it is a centre of excellence for medicine and surgery. If you're ill this is the place you wan't to be!

My first 5 week attachment is in surgery and i started last week. Luckily I avoided the fun and games of colorectal surgery and the necrotic limbed vascular patients, and ended up on the transplant firm. Not many hospitals in the UK offer a transplant service, so I'm actually very lucky to have found my way into this speciality.

So what do they transplant? Well, i've only been there a week so i'm sure there's lots I don't know about (good humility there). What i've seen so far is a kidney transplant and a liver transplant. Pretty amazing stuff by any standards (perhaps not as good as the removal of someone's rectum that a friend got to see last week.......no actually it is better isn't it!).

So transplant surgery seems awesome. Pre-op the patients are incredibly ill, either looking very yellow (livers) or just looking ill (kidneys). But astoundingly, only a short time after their operations these patients are unrecognisable! Bubbly, jumping around (sort of).

Bring on some hearts hey!

The introductory 3 weeks...

2 weeks of the introductory course are down! and 1 still to go....so what have I been learning? Well I now know how to communicate with patients a little better (perhaps) and rather excitingly we were taught how to take blood this week. Only a few of the girls fainted which isn't too bad I suppose.

Next week i'll be taught how to wash my hands effectively. I think this is when we cover our hands in a special soap type thing that is transparent and then we try to wash it all off. After doing that we shine our hands under a uv lamp and you can see how much of the original stuff is still on your hands (which is usually quite a lot).

Social stuff has been good this past fortnight, with lots of freshers parties just for the medics culminating in a school disco themed party on the friday of week 2. I think I actually wear my school uniform more since i've come to university than when I was at school! Which is odd!