Hands-On

One of the more exciting parts of the surgery rotation is doing procedures in either the emergency department or the operating room. Of course in surgeries, we get to suture and assist. But I've been doing a lot of other fun things. A clinic patient had an abscess on his scalp so I did an incision and drainage, numbing up the area and then using a scalpel to reopen the lesion for pus to drain. I put a Foley catheter into a male (into the bladder to drain urine) which, while not the most glamorous of procedures, is easy for a medical student to do. It was also important because the patient had a hole in his kidney and all the fluid coming out was bloody. I attempted two femoral sticks for arterial blood gases, though I wasn't successful (I aimed too medially and hit the vein instead). And lastly on a trauma activation, I got to put in a chest tube for a pneumothorax, a decently complicated and scary procedure; we made a big incision at the fifth intercostal space mid-axillary line, used blunt dissection to get into the pleural space, and punctured it to put in a drain. Before putting in the drain, you can feel the lungs directly expanding during inspiration as well as the heart beating just centimeters away. All these hands-on procedures are fun, exciting, and scary; I'm not very good at them, but most simply take practice.