my life, my pace

If you’re planning to have surgery, have it in the morning.  A study shows that adverse events were most common when surgery started between 3pm and 4pm and least common between 9am and noon.  The good news is that these adverse events were mostly related to pain management and postoperative nausea and vomiting and for the most part, were not too dire.

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1. there’s a surgery-phobic guy volunteering at the surgery labAs I've mentioned before, my experiments involve surgery to insert catheters into blood vessels to measure many different things.  So they take place at an animal surgery facility.  And lots of premeds volunteer at this facility.  For the most part, they tend to be your typical gung-ho, annoying premeds.  But once in awhile, there's one that just doesn't fit in.  I'll call him surgery-phobic guy.  I suspect that he's also people-phobic based on the way he interacts (or fails to) with me and the rest of the crew.  He comes in and proceeds to clean the entire building.  He wipes down counters, cleans the prep room, and even wipes down the doors to each room.  But he doesn't ever set foot in the operating room.  Every time I see him, I wonder why the hell he is volunteering at an animal SURGERY facility if he's afraid of surgery. Although there is a virtual army of undergrad volunteers in the morning, they tend to thin out by the latter half of the day.  And this facility is creepy as hell, even during the day because there's absolutely no one around.  It's dead silence except for the sound of the ventilator and the beeping of the pulse-ox.  Couple that with the fact that I've seen my fair share of weird shit happening with the animals (such as twitching, outright paw dancing, and jerking) and it makes for one very jumpy, freaked out me as I sit there all alone watching the animal...
2. no surgery, please (part 2)So my husband and I (despite the fact that we were still exhausted from the previous day’s events) were obligated to return to the hospital the following day to check on mother-in-law, who was doing as well as could be expected given her fear that she was still going to die. We took some time out of our day there to visit my husband’s cousin, who had been admitted last night and who was only down the hall from my mother-in-law.  Typical teenager that he is, he merely laid there pretty much indifferent to the happenings around him (apparently for Chinese people, when someone ends up in the hospital for whatever reason, it is reason to have the entire extended family visit) playing with his Nintendo DS.  His mom was glad to see me because she wanted my medical opinion about her son’s case.  No amount of reasoning on my part was able to convince her of the fact that I am but merely a med student with very limited clinical experience who really has no place commenting on her son’s case. Apparently, my cousin-in-law had also fractured his tibia and fibula in his fall (though not as badly as my mother-in-law) and the orthopedic surgeon (the same one who treated my mother-in-law) also decided that surgery with insertion of plates was the best course of action for him.  However, this was not settling well with his family, but for a different reason. His mom explained to me that Chinese...
3. and yet surgery intrigues meWell, because of Grey’s Anatomy, of course! Before you have a heart attack and call me a big fat hypocrite, I’m kidding! Despite my aversion to blood and guts, I’ve been oddly drawn to surgery ever since I started med school. At first, it was probably because I was surrounded by gunners who all wanted to be some sort of surgeon and the need to claim I was interested in a competitive specialty because of everyone’s perception that I was one of the smarter ones (probably because of the whole MD/PhD thing). But after my little thumb-gushing-blood incident, I thought twice about my little ambition. Besides, my ego definitely isn’t the size of a surgeon’s. But I was still drawn to surgical specialties, just less full-of-guts ones like ophthalmology and neurosurgery. Then I went to grad school. And decided that I was just kidding myself in my desire to become some sort of surgeon. So I went back to the first specialty I was interested in: neurology. And I was into that for quite awhile. But now I find myself intrigued in surgery again. This renewed interest is probably due to the nature of my experiments, which involve surgical instrumentation of the animal. When I first started this project, I was told that I would have to eventually learn how to do everything myself, including the surgery. The thought freaked me out at the time. But as I did more experiments and observed more surgeries, I became intrigued with the...

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