Preparing for Inpatient Surgery

I'm done now with all of the surgery subspecialty outpatient clinics. Since I'm going to be on the colorectal team, I had a half day of general surgery on Wednesday morning. I also had half days of urology, vascular surgery, and pediatric surgery. Most of the general surgery patients I saw were men who needed hernia repairs, really basic bread-and-butter stuff. My urology preceptor was a pediatric urologist, so I saw a bunch of kids with undescended testicles. Just in case any of you are new parents and worried, the testicle will usually come down in the first year or two of the kid's life without requiring surgery. Vascular surgery is really cool. The attending I worked with does 3D imaging of the patient's aorta and other vessels that have aneurysms. (Aneurysms are weaknesses in the blood vessel wall that lead to it expanding, kind of like a balloon. If they get too big, there is a danger that they could burst and quickly kill the patient.) Then he orders grafts that are made in Australia. It takes a few months for them to arrive since each graft is custom-made for that particular patient.

I have this weekend off and should be starting inpatient surgery on Monday. But I lucked out and got the day off for Labor Day since it's the first day for the two of us on this track. The other current surgery students who started the week before us did not get it off. (They are on a different track.) So needless to say, the two of us did not publicize this good fortune. It's not like I'm going to be spending the weekend doing anything fun anyway. We have 20 work-intensive surgery question prompts that we have to prepare for an oral exam at the end of the rotation, and that's what I'm going to spend this weekend doing. I know there won't be a lot of time to work on these prompts once things get going on Tuesday!