friiiiday

11/14/08

It’s Friday! I have all of NYC to myself this weekend!

today I rolled out of bed at 5:10 am- still trying to adjust to the time difference, got the 6 am shuttle, fell asleep on the way listening to my Osler’s lecture on vascular surgery on my ipod on the way, met with my team. I like my team. one girl is from Jamaica, she’s an intern who went to tufts. really smart girl. once in a while she’ll bust out her accent which I absolutely love. the chief is from Ecuador. if you close your eyes, he sounds like owen Wilson. if you look at him really closely, he even looks like him. or maybe if you just squint your eyes and imagine him with blonde hair. we rounded on a couple patients, one of whom was a 22 yr old girl, really pretty girl, with crohn’s disease who had just had part of her intestine taken out. she now has a connection from one end of her intestine to the skin on her stomach- it’s called a stoma or an ostomy. eventually we’ll reconnect her. the other one was an old guy who had diverticulitis- it happens in lots of people, especially older people, when you get a weakness in the wall of your large intestine, so you get small outpouchings in the wall of your intestine. sometimes they get inflamed, and you get tons of pain. and you get small holes in your intestine, which is bad. it’s like someone took a dump in your abdominal cavity.

I saw my first open heart surgery today since I was an MS1!! so fricken cool. It was an aortic valve replacement. the whole surgery is so orchestrated with tons of essential teammembers- the perfusionists running the bypass machine, the anesthesiologist and two anesthesia nurses, the circulating nurse, the surgeon of course and his assistant surgeon, the scrub tech in charge of the buffet table of sterile surgical instruments. the patient was a jehovah’s witness, so she doesn’t believe in receiving blood products. which is hard as a surgeon, b/c you always expect some bleeding, and especially with a major surgery. so what they did was take out some of her own blood before the surgery, give her tons of saline, so she has the same volume of fluid circulating in her body, but when she bleeds, she’s losing more fluid than blood cells, then at the end of the case, they give her back her blood. cool, huh? the surgeon cuts open her chest, saws through her sternum (breast bone), cuts through the thin sac that covers the heart, puts two tubes into two different chambers of her heart, circulates her blood through the bypass machine (which basically is an artificial heart, lungs, and set of kidneys- aka her lifesource), stops her heart, opens up her heart and operates. the whole time her heart is cooled down to ice cold. after the valve is replaced, the body is warmed back up, and the heart starts to beat on its own. so fucking cool!

I then scrubbed into a hernia repair. bread and butter of general surgery. the guy was a Chinese gentleman who was mountain climbing in china, and noticed the bump on his lower right belly, pushed it back in, but then it started to hurt him so he came to the hospital.

I had the option of scrubbing into a lap Nissen, a lap chole or another hernia,…I was so tired!! I would fall asleep on any of the laps, so I thought I’d go and lay down for 10 minutes then scrub into the hernia. an hour later…and I missed the surgeries. I felt kinda bad, but at the same time, this is my last year of being able to do this. next year I will have no choice but to keep going…so I’m just gonna be honest with myself and realize I’m here to learn what I want and not necessarily to work my ass off. I have no problems with working my ass off when the time comes. for now, I will be good to myself. maybe I’m just rationalizing, but whatever.

caught the 5 a clock shuttle, and debated about whether to head to the gym. considering my entire back and legs are sore to the point where sometimes I feel like I’m walking like I need to use the bathroom or maybe I got smacked on the ass really bad, I thought I’d rest. did my laundry in the basement of my building, chatted on the phone, made plans with leah to meet for dinner tomorrow night- she’s on the bus from boston right now, got ideas from malia about how to spend my whole weekend, and made plans for tonight to meet up with a friend from guam at 3rd ave and 13th street for his birthday party….woohoo!

ooh! I got another interview! at brown university in providence, rhode island. it’s while I’m here in nyc, so it’s 3 hours by bus or an hour by plane. never been to rhode island, -it’s the smallest state I think? whatever.

today I felt the calmest I have since I’ve come here. whether it’s the fact that I’m in nyc, or that I’m in a new city, or that I’m interviewing and it’s stressful to figure out where I’ll be for the next 5 years, or that it’s cold, or that I do miss the ocean and familiarity, I’ve felt like a hurricane inside. I expected this, because I felt the same way my first week up at uc davis. I wonder if I’ll ever learn to calm the fuck down when I travel or go to new places. it’s a fine line between excitement and anxiety, you know? there’s also that always looming possibility of feeling totally alone, which I haven’t felt yet, thanks to email/blackberry/phone/distraction of the city. I know it’s bound to happen, but hopefully I’ll know how to deal with it- call someone! I’m terrible at reaching out to my friends when I really need them, out of fear of ‘bothering them’. I know it’s ridiculous but it’s the only child/stubborn independent person in me. there’s also the upcoming thanksgiving holiday which I’m hoping to find someone to spend it with.

despite this underlying current of anxiety, I’m mostly trying to make the very best of being here. I know I am already. gonna keep on keeping on! off to get ready for the night!