Long day...

Today was pretty long.... Wednesday's are usually education and conference days. Meaning after we round on patients at 6 in the morning, we have to go back to Baylor's campus for Surgery Grand Rounds, which is pretty much a speaker giving a presentation on a particular topic for everyone in the department of Surgery. Then at 8 we have a lecture just for the medical students in their surgery clerkship. Today's was really interesting by the way, especially with my background as an EMT. It was about the changing standards of care in regards to emergency trauma patients in whether or not to give them large amounts of fluid to raise their blood pressure before any treatment begins. Say if a person has been in a bad car wreck and has lost a lot of blood, usually the first thing the paramedic on the scene would do is to put two huge IV tubes in them and pump them with as much fluids as possible, thinking you had to keep the blood pressure up. Trauma people are starting to change their attitudes on this because of a lot of very new research saying that people who are just left hypotensive until surgery do much much better. So it was actually a very informative lecture.

Back at the hospital around 9 or so, I was planning on a day of just more floor work since I wasn't expecting to go to the OR today, however, Cardiovascular surgery called saying their students were gone for computer training and they needed some from general to help out with two Coronary bypass surgeries. So I got drafted to help out with an open heart surgery case. It was my first triple bypas to help out with, and in that aspect it was really good to be in on. I got to help harvest and strip a vein, and then hold the heart for the surgeons to get a good position for the bypass. Again, it's hard to stand in one position--horribly off balance--and trying to hold something up for a given amount of time, but the surgery went very well and the patient was sent to the recovery room after 6 and half hours.

After that, there was considerable confusion amongst the rest of us as what to do next. Apparently someone had heard that our chief wanted to talk to us, but none of us knew about what. So we hung around, and hung around and basically didn't have a clue what to do about anything. The interns were all either just sitting around doing notes or nowhere to be found. It took us til 7 to meet back up with our teams and even then there was nothing to discuss. It was just a bunch of wasted time when we could have been doing something far more productive than waiting for a team meeting that never happened. Oh well, such things happen.