MedMusings

ok so orthopaedics is a bit of a mixed bag . Some times its a whole lot of fun, other times its even more boring than respiratory

the last 12 weeks of med was bludgy, surgery is the complete opposite. Today we started at 8am, saw patients in the Dr’s private rooms. basically he puts u in a room of ur own and u take a history and examine the patient then he comes in and you have to present. really good experience.. im still pretty bad at presenting tho. we mainly see alot of patients with osteoarthritis or fracture

Then in the arvo we went into surgery… 16 surgeries bout 8hrs all up! ended up going home at 10:30pm. There were alot of arthroscopies which got soo boring after a while.. buut totally worth it when our last surgery was reattachment of a ruptured biceps tendon (i got to stick my finger in the man’s arm and touch his tendon!) Divya and i took turns scrubbing in, we got to hold and play around with the scope during a knee arthroscopy. its fun! but very hard to control and then most of the time we just hold the retractor or assist as much as possible

aaand i have discovered that surgeons don’t eat!… up until i got home all i had eaten all day was a hashbrown and coffee in the morn, then a few pieces of fruit in the evening. we were basically with our surgeon all day and he didnt eat til about 7pm. so ,helpful tip when doing surg rotation.. pack lots of small snacks that are quick and easy to eat!

ok so i dont know if this post makes any sense coz im too tired to proof read… but in summary: so far surgery (yaay!), ortho (mmmeeh not really, too much lifting of legs). ortho is alot of carpenter work, drills, nails, hammers, bone saws. It still rates above respiratory.. but i am missing those ABGs

hope u’s are enjoying ur rotation

cheers

ps. i had pork ribs for dinner when i got home today… and i was cutting the meat off the bone with my knife and all i could picture in my head were the muscles and veins of the arm from surgery today. and then i was thinking to myself what if this piece of bone is like the glenohumeral joint of the pig and what if this piece of meat im biting into is its biceps muscle.. and then i kinda started wondering what human meat would look like when cooked =S …. so moral of the story… don’t be surprised if i come out of this rotation as a vegetarian

Ok so respiratory medicine officially sucks… would never become a respiratory physician/respirologist?? its crossed off the list! This is my list so far:

• Gastro ?
• Respiratory

However, we did 2 night shifts last week which were actually very interesting/fun. First night was a whole lot of bloods, cannulas and ABGs (ABGs are the only good thing about respiratory); that lasted a few hours and then it was pretty quiet after. Second night was again a few cannulas and an IDC on a male, that was….. pretty yuuck to be honest, but a good experience nonetheless.

So as a massive generalisation - respiratory is just too dull, everyone’s got a cough, everyone’s got dyspnoea and everyone smokes. On the plus side, im getting better at reading chest xrays

On a more serious note, cancer is scary. Had so many patients with cancer, its a little harder to sympathise for the lung cancer patients coz most of them are smoking related. But the others we saw in gastro were pretty sad, very devestating for the patients.