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Sunday, July 24, 2011

Stress and Surgery Day

It has been a while since I last wrote on here. School has been a little crazy lately. We are coming to the end of the didactic phase, August 5th is our last day. There is still a lot before then, and stress is high amongst myself and my classmates.

This past friday was fun though, we had surgery day! Each of us were in groups and assigned to a "surgery" later that day. We had to look up everything about that surgery in order to report back to our preceptor for intense questioning about the surgery, complication, indication, etc. While preparing for that we did rounds with our attending. We saw 4 patients, they were our teachers, who all pretended to have complications post surgery. I think our teachers enjoyed this part, they went all out: having pretend IV lines placed, foley catheters with yellow highlighter colored urine, fake incisions, the works. It was pretty funny. After we saw those patients we wrote up notes on them. Anytime during this day there were two people on call who got called to dispense orders for those 4 patients. That part was the hardest because we had to think on the spot over the phone how to treat our patient. Once, we were called in and had to examine the patient. Finally, we ended the day writing up a post-operative note for our patient having surgery. My groups surgery was a carotid endarterectomy.

The day was really fun and not as stressful as I was expecting. It was a nice way to ease into our real surgery rotation during clincals. I think the students had as much fun as our teachers. Oh, and we had to come in at 6am to start rounds on surgery day making the experience even more realistic.

Well, we have a hard 2 weeks ahead of us, hopefully we will all come out unscathed and ready to take on rotations on August 15h.