Academics || #returnswithvengeance

The week following Vienna was designated at "hell week" if that gives you any idea... We had physiology AND differential equations exams on Thursday, followed by a device design presentation Friday.  Yet, I've always been a firm believer in (1) forming my own opinions and (2) that college students get more worried when they worry in groups. I say this because the dreaded "hell week" was not that bad in all actuality.  I rather liked it for two main reasons.

Firstly, Tuesday morning was one of the most enlightening and inspiring medical experiences I have ever had.  Suited up in scrubs (which I now agree are the most comfortable clothes in world), my peers and I entered the surgical wing of one of the hospitals in Bonn, one associated with the university.  Random chance determined which operation room every student ultimately stayed in.  I volunteered to be in the first group of three people to be placed in a room and was the second to be directed into a preparation room where three doctors busily moved around the hospital bed.  As I entered and peered around them, I was surprised to see a small white hand on the bed.

Cute little baby Amelia laid sedated on the hospital bed as they fitted her with an IV, two leads, and a brain oxygenation probe among many things.  The combination of congestion, breathing through a mast, and perhaps subconsciously getting weirded out at the thought of a surgery made me feel light-headed at moments.  Thankfully, I got this out of the way early.  Once I entered the surgery room, the anesthesiologist, with whom I was allowed to discussed all my questions, found a stool for me to stand on (yay for the vertically challenged!) so that I could watch the surgery...two and a half feet from the baby's chest, with scrubs on and machines crammed behind me, at times one foot from the face of each surgeon, with a view of the other seven or so doctors, practitioners, and technicians in the room all fighting for a better life for this little girl.  What surgery did I see exactly?  As the anesthesiologist audibly and later visually explained to me when he had time, little Amelia was born without a pulmonary artery valve as well as two holes in her septum, one of which was most likely an unclosed foramen ovale as I later learned from my TA.  These defects resulted in stenosis, poor blood flow, and high pressure in the right ventricle as well as the pulmonary arteries.  As an ancillary problem to unsustainable blood circulation, the built-up pressure of the pulmonary arteries increased their diameter, creating enough force to partially collapse Amelia's airways.

Now, all of this is interesting to simply read and logically makes sense to those with a medical background.  Yet, seeing a surgeon methodically cut the skin over the septum, saw the septum, trim away the underlying layer of tissue and tendons, insert and expand a retractor inside the opening to keep the chest expanded, cut the pericardium, attach cannulas to the heart to redirect the blood into a device I believe he called an ECOS (extracorporeal oxygenation system?), and proceed to patch one hole, sew the other hole, and bypass the pulmonary artery with a bovine vessel...is a whole different feeling.  Seeing a heart beating within a human's chest, slow to a stop, and then start boldly beating again is one of the most interesting experience in the world.

Secondly, we ended "hell week" with a reward trip!  My trip to Berlin with Blake, Ashley, Ryan, and Jay was my first experience as a true backpacker I would say.  We sleep from 11pm to 7am on the bus Friday night, experienced Berlin with our backpacks on for the majority of Saturday and Sunday, walked a total of nearly 30 miles, and slept 11pm to 7am on the way back before having class at 11:45am Monday morning.  It was a quick and inexpensive, but entirely rewarding trip.  Berlin? Check.