#ScrubSelfies

We had some pretty cool program events this last week. We went to the Anesthesia Museum and got to see some of the old equipment that doctors and surgeons used to anesthetize patients. My favorite part of the museum was actually not an anesthetic but the Iron lung machine. Since my paternal grandfather had polio and my father had tetanus when he was very young, it was possible that at some point each was hooked up to an iron lung similar to what we saw. I never met my grandfather and my father doesn’t remember very much of his tetanus experience, I can’t say for sure if they used an iron lung but it seems likely. My favorite program part this past week though was observing surgeries. I saw 2 ½ surgeries. The first was a cleaning of a man’s foot that was nearly lost it in a heavy equipment accident. It was pretty routine until he woke up three fourths of the way through the surgery. He didn’t feel anything but it was sort of stressful, at least for me. They were able to get him re-sedated and the rest of the surgery went without a hitch. The second surgery was of a woman who was getting her axillary lymph nodes removed because her cancer (breast I think) had begun to metastasize so they decided to remove them as a precaution. It was a really interesting surgery and the surgeon tried to include us as much as possible in the surgery so he took care to show us interesting things and tell us about what he was doing. It was fairly hard to see though, so I didn’t get to see as much as I would have liked. The last half of a surgery I watched was of the same woman who this time was getting the lymph nodes under the right half of her jaw removed. This surgery was done by a surgeon who was much less interactive so it was not as interesting as the first done on her. It was also even harder to see what was happening since there were more people surrounding the patient and making sure that nothing went wrong during the surgery.