End of Surgery

I can't believe that my entire surgery rotation is over already. It was way too short. Here I have finally reached the point where I was starting to get the hang of things and enjoy the rotation, and bam, that's it. Time to move on. Apparently I'm not the only one who feels this way, because the new clinical curriculum is going to have more time devoted to surgery.

The rest of this week has been kind of easy and relaxed. On Wednesday, I wanted to scrub in for a vascular surgery. But there were some bigwig visitors from another hospital there, so I got relegated to watching the screen in the control room. The surgery wasn't all that interesting anyway, at least not up until the point where they deployed the stent. That was really cool. The stents are self-expanding. I'm still not totally clear about what they do to get the stent to stay retracted while they're manuevering it, and then to expand once it is in place. But you can actually watch it spring open on the screen.

Afterward, I went to see what my team was doing and find out if my attending wanted me to scrub. They were running late in the OR, so I offered to go round on our patients myself and then present to them. The attending agreed, and I went to collect our patients' labs and check on their progress. This worked out tremendously well. Not only did I help get all of us out earlier by presenting to them in the OR, but she wrote a very good eval for me about the initiative and teamwork I had shown.

The attending has her outpatient surgery day at one of the satellite clinics on Thursdays, so I had a reading day to get ready for my presentation today. I presented on a woman who had a breast lump. There was a mammogram and an ultrasound available, but I couldn't figure out how to get them to open in Epic. It turns out that only some computers on campus have whatever karma is necessary to open those films, and the fellow on my team had one of them. So he helped me get the films open and copied into my presentation, and overall it went well.

Our didactic today was on bariatric surgery, which is cool. But we had already seen a lot of this stuff last year, so it wasn't the most exciting. The afternoon research seminar was even more painful. It was on how to make a good presentation. Why the research curriculum people thought we should cover this topic in our third year of med school is beyond me, since we've been doing research presentations for two years already. I also don't understand the need to beat the topic to death for three straight hours on a Friday afternoon. But no doubt this is why I am not designing medical school curriculums. To make matters even worse, we had a class meeting afterward to teach us how to sign up for electives and advanced rotations. I've already signed up for some of both with no instructions, and it is extremely simple. You go to the online elective catalog, pick out what rotations you want and when you want to take them, and email the list to the registrar. That's seriously all there is to it. (You may have noticed that I feel a bit cranky this afternoon!)