Shadowing!

A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege of shadowing my dad at the hospital he works at. It was an AWESOME trip. It was really interesting to see my dad at work.

In surgery, my dad's job is to put the patients to sleep and then monitor their blood pressure, heart rate, pain level, etc. He has a pretty intense job, because he needs to know what medicines do what to keep the patient stable. In all of the surgeries we stood at the top of the table near the anesthesia machine. Not sure what you call it. Anyway - here are the surgeries I was able to see. Forgive me for the details and for my lack of medical knowledge. I have no idea what they call the majority of the instruments they use.

Surgeries:

1. Fracture - they pushed the bones back together. This surgery was extremely short. Maybe 10-15 min once started.

2. This lady had a big cyst on her thumb and needed to have it operated on. I'm not quite sure what they did, because when they finished it still looked the same. But I didn't say anything. They knew what they were doing, right? She also woke up VERY grumpy from the anesthesia. She ended up scratching one of the anesthesia techs pretty bad. She also ended up ripping out her stitches and had to be restitched.

3. The next one was an appendectomy. They ended up sticking what looked like three huge, round, metal pipes into the patients abdomen. Then they threaded two of the tubes with big sticks with cameras on the end. A third stick looked like it had a crab claw on the end of it. They filled the abdomen with gas to expand the stomach, looked around for the appendix, and cut it off. The bagging part of the appendix was really neat.

4. A lady had kidney stones that needed blasting. It sounds a lot more interesting then it really is. It took a very long time, and we had to wear x-ray suits to prevent us from getting exposed to radiation. I didn't like it - we had to wear these goggles to protect our eyes from the blasting laser that they use. I couldn't wear the goggles and my glasses, so I could barely see anything.

5. A 25 year old male got into a really bad car accident. My dad got called in to see what was going on and to prepare for surgery. There is nothing like being called in to an emergency case. It just feels awesome. I wanted to put sirens on my dads car.

When we showed up, the guy was in the ER. Blood was everywhere and his tibia was sticking out of his leg. He had pretty bad wounds on his face that they had to stitch up. He had a pneumothorax, which is a collapsed lung, and to fix it they put a tube in his chest. They took him back for a CT scan to see if he was bleeding in his brain and luckily, he wasn't. He was having issues with the circulation in his leg, so after the scan they took him back to the operating room. They had to basically re-wire his circulation to get blood down to his foot. My dad wasn't in charge that day, so another anesthesiologist, Shane, (who happens to be LDS), took the case, though we did get to take over when he went on his lunch break.

It was cool to see that surgery. They had his leg completely open. It was intense. This case had an impact on me for several reasons. One, he was 25 - I'm 25. I'm actually only 10 days older than him. Two, he got up that morning, took a shower, ate breakfast, went to work, had some lunch and then EVERYTHING changed. Life is so fragile. We never know what is going to happen. I found out later that they were considering amputating his foot, because they were having difficulty rewiring the circulation. I never found out what actually happened because my trip ended. Fortunately, he lived, which was a surprise to most of the doctors. According to my dad, his medical bills would have been around $300,000 after all the surgery and tests. Insane.

6. The other surgery was the guy on the other end of the same wreck. He was conscious and his tibia was also broken, but not nearly as bad as the other patient. He was a super nice guy and you could tell he was just annoyed that the wreck happened. We just cleaned his wound and scheduled him to come back later in the week.

On Wednesday my dad was working at the medical surgical center instead of the hospital.

1. He had three carpal tunnel cases. We didn't get to watch the actual surgery, but he was in charge of putting in the nerve blocks for these.

In order to put in the blocks, he used an ultrasound machine. He would goop them with gel, and place the little ultrasound transducer up to their neck and for their nerves. Once found, he would stick a needle into their neck and inject them with medicine that would numb their arm for the surgery. It was awesome. Medical technology is really cool.

I had a great time. I would love to be able to go back and watch more.