So I finished up with peds last month at the hospital which was a good experience, but it has been a crazy transition from being around predominantly women physicians and residents at the Children's hospital to now working in a specialty dominated by testosterone. This month I have orthopedic surgery, and its basically filled with lots of blood, broken bones, metal prosthesis and powertools. The speciatly itself, is pretty remarkable, and while it still may be an option, its not at the top of my list. I big problem about this whole month, is the rotation itself. The orthopedics group is a great group, but there are so many residents and three other students, that I get limited to being 3rd assist during the surgery, or only watching. This rotation is more of "face time" if I want to do my residency with this group, unfortunately if I don't, this rotation may be pretty worthless because I don't get much hands on experience, compared to my last couple rotations. I'm really limited to doing scutwork when it is available, but besides writing a few prescriptions, changing dressings, and occasionally scrubbing into some cases, this month is not looking too exciting. The worse part of it all is the long hours, which drag like none other when you are standing around. So far this week, I've only scrubbed one case to hold up a leg, cut a few sutures and throw in some staples. It was a pretty cool surgery to see though. The patient had shattered his tibia and fibula about midshaft, and the surgery consisted of placing a rod straight through the tibia. The surgery before that I watched was similar, but I only got to watch that from a distance, which was probably ok because the repetitive x-rays to confirm placement of the rod was probably good enough to destroy any chance of me having kids, which is why I made sure that on the surgery I scrubbed in on next to wear a lead vest. Since there are four students, we each only have to take a weekend of call, mine is this weekend of course. I feel like I haven't had a weekend off now without having to come into the hospital for over a month now, who knew this would be so painful. Anyways, enough of my bitching. My excitement for today after rounding/shadowing was playing a 2-on-2 game with Dustin against two high-school kids at the gym. Holy s#!t, I'm old and out of shape. Of course they beat us, but we have about 10yrs on them, that's 10 more years to f_ck up your body. So my whole goal of getting back into the gym, keeps biting me in the @$$. I can't get healthy eating the crap I eat at the hospital, and I'm too piss @$$ tired when I get home to lift, not to mention I have to look up stuff for the following days' surgeries. $#!t, more bitching. When did I get to become such a negative @$$ person?!? Oh well. That's all I got for now.
