Surgery Interest Group Meeting

This afternoon, the surgery interest group had a "suture lab" where we could learn how to tie knots and sew people up. Of course, we first years did not do any actual sewing! Instead, we spent our time practicing tying two-handed knots. One of the surgery residents showed us how to do it, and then he paired us each with another student to try it ourselves. It took some practice and concentration, but toward the end I was finally starting to get the hang of it. Not that I think I'm surgeon material by any stretch of the imagination! The student I was partnered with caught on very quickly and helped me until I caught on too. We started out tying knots in ropes, then we used actual sutures, and finally we used sutures while we were wearing gloves. It's a lot easier to tie knots in ropes because the knots are bigger, so you can actually see what you're doing. In contrast, the sutures are very fine, and the knots are so small that you can barely see them. Once you put the gloves on, it gets even harder because you can barely feel the sutures in your hands any more. I'm sure I'll forget how to tie these knots pretty quickly, but I'm hoping that the next time I will learn how to do them faster.

After practicing with my partner for about an hour, I went to see what the upperclassmen were doing. They had an actual cadaver that they were sewing up. I know I've mentioned before that the cadavers we use here at CCLCM are not preserved like they are at most med schools. So this guy was lying on the table, and he looked like he could just wake up at any moment, hop off the table, and walk out of the room. Of course, the weird thing was that half a dozen students were crowded around him sewing up gashes in his limbs and abdomen. And of course he didn't bleed. One thing that impressed me though was how bright and yellow his fat was. Apparently that is the real color.

We had PSS this morning, and today we covered the urea cycle. Nothing out of the ordinary to comment on as far as that's concerned, except that we totally skipped covering nucleotide metabolism and individual amino acid pathways. So I'm thinking that I'm going to need to read those sections of the book myself, because Friday's session doesn't cover them either, and that's the last PSS.