Week 7

One of the absolute highlights of this study abroad experience was getting to shadow surgeons at the Universitätsklinikum Bonn and observe real life surgeries! After scrubbing in, we were all paired with different anesthesiologists and taken to the ORs. The first surgery I watched was a procedure to treat chronic back pain. Guided by an imaging device inserted into the patient, the surgeon went in and cauterized the sensory nerves between certain vertebrae in the patient’s lower back to prevent pain signals from being transmitted to the brain from that particular region of the back. I remember Dr. Wasser had just talked about this kind of procedure in a physiology class a few days before so it was super cool seeing what we learned in class being applied in real life! After the surgery, the surgeon very kindly took the time to show me the patient’s x-rays and pointed out where the cauterized nerves were located.

Since the first surgery was fairly short and took less than an hour, I got to observe a second one! I walked into the next OR about an hour into the procedure not knowing what kind of surgery I would be seeing. I may or may not have gasped really loudly when I got into the room. There was a live human heart just laying there, out in the open, beating and beating. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was so cool and weird and fascinating just watching it beat, working so hard to pump blood out to the rest of the body. The surgeon was performing a coronary artery bypass graft surgery. But first, the patient had to be connected to a heart-lung machine. It was crazy to see the heart completely stop beating and turn yellow from lack of blood flow right before my eyes. A healthy vein was then taken from the patient's leg and grafted to the aorta and coronary artery to bypass the occluded region. Watching the surgeon so carefully but confidently maneuver around the fat, tissue, vessels, and blood underneath the skin, you truly realize and appreciate the amount of training doctors have to undergo and the level of knowledge that they have! Overall, I feel so incredibly lucky to have been given this opportunity.