Day 20: 🌚 Bonne Nuit 🌝

per·se·ver·ance

/pərsəˈvirəns/

noun

Steadfastness in doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success.

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🔥Chloe's fire album will be dropping next week🔥

Today was a short day in the OR. Some days you never know how long the shadowing will be but at times quality is better than quantity. Today both Chloe and I shadowed in anesthesiology which I was excited for as I had originally thought this was going to be my top residency of choice after switching from pre-pharmacy. Even though the physician we had on our schedules was not in the OR that day the department was kind enough to pass us along between the physicians so we could observe a wide amount of procedures and surgeries. Lucky for us, not all of the cases were easy peasy patients.

To begin with, Dr. Carithers took as to observe a nasal intubation for jaw surgery in plastics. So far, I've only seen a patient be intubated through their mouths but it was really interesting to listen to the different types of surgeries anesthesiologists would use different intubations or drugs. So far, each time that I have shadowed in surgery I've only been able to see the different anesthesiologists use similar looking tubes and techniques to put the patient to sleep but now its nice to know what coloured liquid does what, why they increase the patients CO2 consumptions, and how important muscle relaxers are for intubation. That's always what I find the most frustrating when I shadow: not understanding everything that is going on around me. Each time I get a piece of the puzzle I feel a little smarter and more confidence that medicine is the right field for me.

For the majority of our time in the OR, Chloe and I shadowed Dr. Mathis. With him, we walked around the OR and he answered all of our pressing questions about his profession, residency, where he sees the future of anesthesiology going as well as his lifestyle. All of the anesthesiologists, as tired as some of them may have been, seemed to enjoy their jobs and the work that they did. Something that Dr. Mathis said that I found important was that once he left the hospital his job didn't require him to really follow up his patients. Yes he did prepare the night before going into the OR each day but it was never a long term relationship with any of them. One particular part of anesthesiology that I certainly find appealing is the variety of the cases the physicians can, or choose to, cover. Different patient populations require different areas of focus in anesthesiology, pediatrics being one of them. There are a lot of options going into this specialty that I had not thought of before but I definitely want to look into it more. One particular detail that I did notice was that there was only one female anesthesiologist that we saw our entire time at the department and on the floor. It's still a male dominated field but I don't see whats keeping more woman won't be entering it in the future.

Out of the cases we saw there were three that certainly stood out to me the most. The first was a patient who's tolerance to the anesthesia was extremely high. It took much longer than the anesthesiologists expected to intubate her and completely put her under; due to other conditions the patient had they could not use too many muscle relaxers and the patient's blood pressure would either remain too low or too high. I loved watching the doctors problem-solve their way out of the situation but also getting to have hands on interaction with the case. Once the patient had been successfully intubated, Dr. Mathis told us that if they had not been able to complete the procedure soon (as near the end her blood pressure was too low) he might have had to perform chest compressions on top of the vasoconstrictors he had administered. The last two cases that Chloe and I observed both had me in awe: open-heart surgery. I've been lucky enough to see someone's chest opened during my time in ENT but seeing the heart being the sole focus of the operation was entirely different. Its so fragile looking and small I can't imagine the patience it takes to learn how to operate on it but the surgeon (Dr. Davis) we observed in both cases was definitely not delicate with it. He worked incredibly fast and the only time during the surgery that I ever felt nauseous was when they stopped the patients heart. It wasn't natural and I had a hard time conceptualizing at first that this was a live person still on the operating table even though his heart wasn't beating in his chest. It was a bit eerie to be honest. I loved watching Dr. Davis work though and all of the questions that he answered for us just made me appreciate his and the anesthesiologists work even more. The fact that we can open a patient's chest, operate on his heart, and the entire time he isn't conscious nor in any pain is astounding.

It's week four now. As much as I appreciate all the help that I am getting from the interns and my peers I am feeling a bit burned out from the stress of the application. There's so much riding on this one thing and it makes me a little stressed every time I work on it. Hopefully I'll have submitted sometime this week but right now I really just want it to be over.