Well, 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 whole process and began to want to try my hand at some of the procedures. I haven’t gotten the chance because we’re still trying to streamline the whole process and having a completely inexperienced-nervous-and-freaked-out-by-blood student wield the scalpel isn’t the most efficient way of doing things (unless the goal is to kill the animal really fast). But now that one of my qualifying exam committee members has reminded me of the importance of doing all the work myself, I’m just itching to try. Before, I was terrified at the thought that I would have to cut an animal open and dissect out its vessels for catheterization and was glad that everyone seemed to have forgotten that I needed to learn. But now, I almost can’t wait. And I wonder if I will still be so interested after I do get to try it for myself. I guess we’ll see, won’t we?
Related posts:
- 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...
- why surgery’s not for meIt’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...
- these experiments may not be a complete loss after allMaybe I've been inhaling too much waste isoflurane the last couple of days, but I seem to be deluding myself into believing that these failed experiments of mine are actually useful in the most minute way. You see, I prepare all of the monitors, IVs, and catheters for these experiments, which has taught me how to do such things and what to check when I'm trying to explain an anomalous reading. Not only that, but I've gotten plenty of experience with reading pressure curves to guide the placement of a Swan-Ganz catheter. I also know what to watch out for when an animal is under anesthesia. But most importantly, I've learned how to not freak out and freeze when something goes wrong. Not so long ago, I accidentally pulled a stopcock out on a pressure line and froze, letting blood ooze out from the line onto the ground until the surgeon fixed it for me. Yesterday, I forgot to close a stopcock and blood started oozing back precipitously into the line. But instead of panicking and freezing, I traced the problem to the stopcock and closed it myself, leaving no one the wiser. And today, as I was helping the surgeon introduce a catheter into the external jugular vein, he turned away and the catheter popped out, resulting in a nice stream of blood shooting straight out (surprising considering it was a vein). While he freaked out for a second, I merely pulled back on the ties around the vessel...
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