Day 12: The Early Bird Gets into the ER

Im a morning person, for sure, but waking up at 5:30 to be at the hospital for 6 was a bit of a stretch for me. Still, it was completely worth it. Today was going to be my second day ever in the OR and I was really excited (or maybe that was the coffee I had...). Anyway, the day started with meeting the other Mrs. Lauren Behrendt, one of the student coordinators for the Orthopedic devision. She was so sweet in helping me find the meeting room and telling me about other shadowing opportunities that GHS has! She also warned me that some students don't do well during the orthopedic surgeries because they can't stand the sound of bones cracking... so that was certainly something to look forward to.

After meeting the doctors in their morning debriefing session with the residents, I followed the chief resident Dr. Lee around the OR; she showed me some of the rooms were some procedures were already occurring and helped me find Dr. Sridhar, the physician I was supposed to be shadowing that morning. Dr. Sridhar was very kind in answering my questions and showed me a room where I got to see them set a dislocated shoulder. The interesting thing about orthopedic surgery is the amount of x-ray tech that they use the entire time. The doctors keep pausing what they're doing to look at a quick snapshot the tech has taken with the portable x-ray device (but as portable as it was the machine was still huge). Then, they would return to whatever they were doing. All the procedures that I saw required the physicians to think in a mechanical way which I was told multiple times. Im not sure if its something that I could do because Im not sure if my brain thinks in that way but it certainly was interesting to watch!

When the procedure was over, Dr. Sridhar was kind enough to answer more of my questions about becoming an orthopedic surgeon. I can't believe it takes 5 years of residency including a fellowship! He also told me that its one of the most competitive specialties to get into and from what I've seen I think I understand why. Next, we hoped over to another room where Dr. Creek (a resident) and Dr. Goetz (the attending) were removing and replacing a rod in a man's leg. The man had fractured his leg while working and the previous doctor who had placed the first rod had off-set it. The procedure itself took 3 1/2 hours long and wearing the led-covering to protect myself from radiation made me tired from just standing there! The whole operation took longer than they had thought because the nail in the man's leg was much larger than they had predicted, and the nails they had at the hospital were too small to fit the whole. In the end, Dr. Goetz did a bone graft from the man's hip and used the chips to fill in the gaps of the fracture after the second rod was placed.

One interesting thing that I was able to see during this second procedure was the man who worked between the surgical tech and the doctors. He was a consultant from a company called "Zimmerman" that sold parts to orthopedic surgeons. The man had actually been a surgical technician but was now a representative for the company at GHS. His job was to consult the doctors on what parts to use for different situations and he even recommended some things when the doctors started reaching for another. There's still a lot of different dynamics in the hospital that I don't know of.

#MedExTierII