OR rounds...

Blogging live from the hospital library so no pics. Am doing a OR round or rather known as OT for operating theatres here in Aust. I'm attached to an Anaesthetist everyday and will be learning about maintaining an airway, even if the patient is unconcious. As well as the different levels of sedation and also getting a bit of cannulation in.

Yesterday was a good day. It really reminded me of hospital shows like my favourite at the moment, Greys Anatomy. I don't really know why I like it since there are so many things wrong I can pick with the occupational health and safety side of things. They would never, ever let anyone into the operating theatre with loose hair or even without a surgical cap on. Yet the main character moseys around the set with hair half in her eyes and flipping it here and there just because it makes her look pretty. Also, maybe someone from the US can also tell me why they let people walk around outside the street as well as in the dining room in their scrubs !! The main idea of scrubs is that they have no germs or coffee spills etc from outside that could contaminate the theatre. We have a zone that you have to get changed out of outside clothes into the blue scrubs plus big socks over your shoes and a sexy hair cap that makes you look like the canteen lady. Surgeons get to wear the ones that look more like the ones on TV ... but thats coz they are surgeons.... you gotta have some incentives.

Anyway, I got to peruse the whiteboard type thing just like on TV and see which room I was assigned to and away I went. Morning was a few small surgeries to free vessels so dialysis patients can have a better blood flow to some areas. Afternoon, I got the Anaesthetics Professor who beelives the only way to learn is to be totally free of aids such as the tubes so I had to hold the gas mask over the patient's mouth and nose manually for 6 operations for which a urologists stuck a very long steel tube up people's hoo hoos to check any cysts in their bladders. I am so glad I was not on the other end of the table. Its gotta be bad when there are stirrups.

Anyway, the registrar (or intern for you yanks) took pity on me and was giving me helpful hints like "The surgeon is going to stick the long steel tube up now so you want to make sure you have a very good complete seal around the mask so the patient doesn't wake up when he stick it in." Gee thanks. I never knew holding a mask down and holding a persons jaw up to have a clear airway could be so tiring. Some people's heads are really heavy!!! I got a good nod of approval at the end of the day though as the machine had good readings of oxygen saturations, and the patients were all comfortable at the end of the day. *phew*

Today it was the type of sedation I was more likely to do, which is using drugs IV to just send them sleepy but not unconscious. It was in a totally different department to what I am used to though .... colonoscopies. Still, I am impressed that the drugs were enough to make them not mind a metre tube being shoved up where the sun don't shine. I have never seem the inside of someones mouth and gut all the way to the other side before. Its enough to make me glad I am working on the end I am working on. I asked a gastroenterologist ..."whats that yellow stuff stuck to the walls?" "oh thats just poo" ooookay.... sorry I asked. It was neat how the camera could swing around and a little clippy thing could take some small samples from strange looking lumps in the walls. They were mostly looking for sources of bleeding though.

Well, back to the OTs now ... will write if have more interesting things to report on. Sorry no piccies. I am sure most of you out there will be glad not to see them though.