Falling Down

I fainted on Friday. Passed out cold, fell on the ground kind of fainting. Let's just say, it was my first surgery.

We went to the University Hospital in Bonn on Friday to watch surgeries preformed by real surgeons on real patients. My surgery was just a biopsy of some neck tissue to see if there was something bad going on inside the patient. Most people got put into pairs and my partner was one of my professors, Dr. Meissner. Just to be clear, he is a Biomedical Engineer who works with lasers and computers, not a medical practitioner. We got into our surgery room and awkwardly stood to the side and waited for the surgeons to begin. But instead, they put up a curtain that blocks our view. After a few minutes of waiting for them to say something, we finally asked in German if we could see (because we didn't know the word for watch haha). One of the nurses that wasn't busy got us a stool that put us above the curtain so we could look over and not get in the surgeons way. As I stepped up, I looked down onto the patients chest to see that a square inch of flesh (perfectly square) had already been cut open and pulled apart on this patients chest, right next to the neck. I looked at it and felt perfectly fine. No need to worry yet. At least not for me, at this point Dr. Meissner walked away claiming a calf cramp. After they get a nice big hole, one of the two surgeons took a scalpel and cut a very shallow, half centimeter incision right onto the diaphragm. Somehow, no blood came out, which was the same for the cube of flesh missing on the chest, no blood. I don't know how they did it but they did. Then they took some scissor-esque objects, stuck them into the small incision on the diaphragm, and started disconnecting the bottom of the skin on the patient's chest from the connective tissue beneath the skin. They started at the incision and worked all the way up to the original hole. Once there was what I can only describe as a pocket in the chest, they took a metal rod and began to thread it through the pocket towards the hole. They had yet to connect the pocket to the hole so when the metal rod got there, it had to be puncture through. Apparently, skin is pretty elastic and doesn't break very easily. So, I got to watch the surgeon jab this rod over and over again at the side of this hole in the chest. Each time seeing the skin bulge and squirm like something was trying to escape. After about 15 jabs, the rod breaks through the skin and they thread a catheter through the chest using the metal rod as a guide to pull the catheter through. Even now, I don't feel anything, I am fine.

Dr. Meissner walks back to stand next to me. And utters just a few words, real quiet so as not to disturb the doctors, "I wasn't feeling too hot a second ago."

Gulp. My stomach drops. If he can't stomach it, how am I supposed to? I say back to him, "now that you mention it... I don't feel so well either."

I step off the stool. I take a few steps to get out of the operating room. My vision begins to blur. I start taking deep breaths to try and bring my vision back. I put my hand against a wall...

"Take a deep breath." I hear those words as I start to come out of my slumber. I am disoriented and all I can do is comply. *Breath in, Breath out* As my vision starts to return I look around, the anesthesiologist is right above me talking to me in English, which none of the doctors had done earlier or even tried to communicate with us, and Dr. Meissner is holding my feet in the air.

They eventually get me sitting up and take me out of the room to get something to eat and drink. Where I was joined 10 minutes later by another student who had done the same thing. And afterwards we found that at least half of the engineers had felt a little dizzy at one point during their time in surgery. According to my physiology professor Dr. Wasser, also the program coordinator, usually the worst that happens is someone gets a little dizzy. I guess we are outliers in this statistic.

I don't know if I fainted due to a reflex to the disturbing images I was seeing or if I had just locked my knees trying to see over the curtain but I do know one thing, I choose correctly between being a doctor or just being a doctor engineer. I will make the medical devices for you, just don't make me put them in.