It’s quite simple: blood freaks me out. No, really. Blood really freaks me out. During our first year of med school, we had these preceptorship things where we would once or twice a quarter shadow a preceptor that we are assigned to in order to get some semblance of clinical exposure during our basic science years. I was assigned to an occupational health guy and found it quite…uninteresting as there were rarely any patients whenever I was around and if there were, they were there mostly for required lung function tests because of prior exposure to asbestos or paperwork other mundane things.
There was once a patient who accidentally injected herself with vaccinia virus (vaccine for smallpox) and developed a rather gnarly bump at the injection site. *Yawn* No blood, no problem for me.
But then there was the patient who accidentally sliced her thumb with some sort of cow cutting/killing device. Now that was bad. Apparently worse for me than the patient even because she was just laughing and talking through it all while I was quietly freaking out as I watched my preceptor nonchalantly stick a needle in her wound to inject some lidocaine for anesthesia before stitching it up. The wound was literally gushing blood. I tried not to look at it, but that didn’t help. She started stitching it up and if I were more of a crazy med student, I would have been right in there watching and asking how to stitch such things, but I was too busy trying not to faint and kicking myself for being such a wimp. The room became excruciatingly hot and started spinning and I prayed that she would finish it up between the talking and giggling before I went facedown on the floor. No such luck, so I had to swallow my pride and ask to step out for a moment (or three). Now that was embarrassing to say the least. But it was a good thing I learned that I cannot magically develop a tolerance for the sight of blood by sheer will or just the sheer fact that I was now a med student and above such things as being freaked out by blood before I got to a point where my wimpiness would matter (say my surgery rotation).
That was my only exposure to blood during my preclinical years. (Un)luckily for me, my current experiments involve surgery and blood, but in animals of course. I found that, although I feel bad for the animals and develop a certain affection for them because they’re soft and furry, I was able to deal with cutting them open and doing stuff to them just fine. I even started assisting by retracting and holding vessels closed during catheterization. Everything was just dandy until one random day, when I felt that same awful hotness and short of breathness that I felt back during that thumb-gushing-blood incident three years ago. More than anything, I was confused because I hadn’t even been thinking about what I was doing and I certainly wasn’t freaking out at the sight of the animal being worked on surgically. Yet here I was again, about to faint. And yet again, I didn’t want to look like a wimp, but I had no choice—better a wimp than fainting on the animal. So I excused myself and stepped outside. And surprisingly, it actually took me quite awhile to recover. Luckily for me, the surgeon was very supportive and understanding and commended me for knowing when to step back instead of trying to tough it out until I end up facedown/hurting myself on the floor/operating table.
These experiences, my general freaking out at the sight of blood/exposed organs, the fact that I get super-nervous and would probably slice the carotid artery through and through with my shaking hands, the fact that I don’t have the stamina to stand for however many hours required for an operation, and the fact that I was not very good with anatomy all point to a very non-surgical career for me. Yet I can’t help but still be intrigued by surgery. So intrigued that I want to try operating on my experimental animals instead of letting the surgeon do it all. We’ll see how that goes, won’t we? Since this post has gone on much longer than I’d planned and because I was supposed to start studying three hours ago (surfing and writing a post at the same time isn’t quite the most efficient way to do things here), you’ll just have to wait until tomorrow to read about why surgery intrigues me so.