i’ve been lazy with my postings recently, preferring instead to come home from work and collapse on the floor. i blame the URI that my FP rotation gave me as a parting gift. i’m a bit sad that it had to end, though (the rotation, not the illness). i loved working with my preceptor, and loved sitting around chatting with her about random events, the lakers, food, everything during our down time. on my last day, we had cake (i love wheatberry!) and had lunchy at a patient’s mexican restaurant. frijoles. mmm.

i started my surgery rotation on monday– clinic with a cute doc who reminds me of aladdin or some dashing cartoon prince. tuesday was clinic again, but with a young doc who is just SO EMO. lol. most of my time is spent following around my fellow– who is absolutely hilarious.

patients of note:

- 60 something year old male with a recurrent sarcoma on one of his arms. he had a seriously huge skin graft during his last surgery (5th surgery), and is happily living his life again, shooting his guns with lighter ammo to decrease the recoil.

- 20 something year old female who presented to her FP with a tibial fracture, later diagnosed with fibrodysplasia, but the radiographs look sketchy– could be osteosarcoma (but it doesn’t look like that either)

- 50 something year old male with squamous cell carcinoma of the base of the tongue. he went into surgery to have it removed and reconstructed with jejunum, which is sticking out of his neck right now so we can monitor it to make sure it stays viable.

- adorable 50 something year old woman with a history of mucoepidermoid cancer of a minor salivary gland in her mouth. she and her husband were unbelievably happy– they hugged each other, teased each other, and laughed through the entire interview.

- 40 something year old guy who came in for a laproscopic hernia repair and ended up with poo coming out of his wounds a few days after he was discharged from the hospital– they had to open up his abdomen to explore the damage last week, and today he’s back in the OR to have it cleaned out again. yum.

- poor little hawaiian man with collapsed veins and a high tolerance for pain. i watched as my fellow placed a central line– first trying to go under the clavicle, and then thru the neck. ouch. props to william for actually having done one.

today, i scrubbed in on a total thyroidectomy on a lady who had some suspicious nodules in one lobe of her thyroid. there was only a 20% chance that the thing would be malignant, but she didn’t want to go through surgery twice… so we took out the whole thing. the surgery lasted about 4 hours– pinch. bovie. divide. pinch. bovie. divide. make sure not to slice the recurrent laryngeal nerve. bovie. divide. of course, all i did was: retract. suction. snip. retract. retract. retract. get pimped on blood supply to the thyroid. retract.

afterwards, my fellow ran off to take out/place a few hickman catheters and sent me home early. woo! i took the opportunity to hit a couple rounds on the ball machine (in the light of day!) before running off to the gym. good times.

now… i’m watching the lakers take way too many 3-point attempts in their attempt to extend their losing streak. ta!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 8th, 2006 at 6:00 pm by mi and is filed under medical school. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.