Living well

July 31, 2007 at 7:06 pm | Posted in internship | Leave a comment

Today I got to do my first case of the month. It was pretty simple, just an umbilical hernia. But since I’d never even seen one done before it was all new to me. The chief had text-paged me the evening before to tell me about the case, so I was at least able to find one resource to explain the procedure stepwise. But I didn’t write the steps down, and I’ll have to remember to do that next time. And I need to find a better book for a reference, because the one I looked at seemed pretty sketchy on the details. Although maybe it’s such a basic procedure, the authors found it too boring to write much about.

Still it was a nice case for someone at my level, and I’m proud to say that there was very little bleeding. Until the attending scrubbed in, that is, and promptly nicked an arteriole. It’s possible he did it on purpose, just to see if I know how to ligate an artery intraoperatively (and, um, now I do). But it was still pretty funny. We closed the incision with a subcuticular stitch, which I find very satisfying because the end result is so neat and pretty. Usually. Today the ends gaped a little bit and I wasn’t happy with my work. But it wasn’t awful, and we fixed it with the steri-strips. The chief booked the room for 2.5 hours for the case, and we were done in about half that time. Which is still probably twice as long as that procedure ought to take.

The R3 on my service is a Tulane grad. I didn’t know him as a student, and the Tulane I attended was a very different school, so there’s not a lot of fond reminiscing about good old Tulane Med going on. Not to mention that his job is to make sure I’m doing mine thoroughly, which at the moment doesn’t make for much positive interaction.

Still, I’m finding that I really do like surgery, even when the days are long and grueling. I can’t imagine doing anything else. And contrary to what I thought as I went through the match last year, general surgery is actually pretty cool. Although I’d still take brains over guts any day.