Week 6

Preface:

This last week is the first where I have felt the same time/energy drain from my school work as I would by a week of traveling. Over the last 5 days, we have collectively gone through 5 exams. This is a bit unprecedented for us as we are used to the spread out nature tests back at home. I'm glad that my inclination to stop traveling coincided with need to study all weekend 😅.

Exploring Bonn:

While I didn't do anything super exciting or over-the-top travel wise, I am still finding little gems right here in Bonn as I explore the city. Here are some picture from the walks, runs, and hikes I went on this last week.

Day

Evening

Night

The three following picture are from the
Bad Godesburg Hiking Trail south of Bonn

St. Maria Magdalena

Midweek Surprise:

An experience that I had this week is one that I can say I likely never would have had had I not come to Germany: being witness to open heart surgery. A part of last weeks schedule, everyone visited the Bonn university hospital to sit in on a surgery that we were randomly assigned to. Within minuets after having changed into scrubs for the first (and probably last) time, I was led to an O.R. prep room where I immediately began to feel out of place. Taking up as little space as I could in the relatively small prep room, I observed various doctors, nurses, and assisting medical students prep a man for what could have been any surgery. Things seemed to moving fairly slow until the man was anesthetized. After that, things picked up exponentially. Once he was out, an assistant pulled open a large sliding door that functioned as the back wall of the prep room to reveal the operating room filled with medical light fixtures, every tool that would be needed for the surgery, monitoring machines surrounding almost every side of the operating bed, and even more medical personnel. While I initially tried to maintain my strategy of being out of the way as we transitioned into the full O.R., the medical students and anesthesiologist very quickly had me standing at various ends of the body to explain, demonstrate, and quiz me over the many aspects that go into what I found out was a single coronary bypass and aortic valve replacement surgery. I was very lucky to have just finished the cardio physiology unit in class so that I could, at least from a physiological perspective, follow along with what they were saying. I was also very curious, after having been studying the heart for about 5 weeks, to see everything that I had learned on paper manifest itself in real life. To see a person's beating heart as it sits in their chest was a fairly surreal experience and its one that I am very grateful that I got to have.