Not an official placement more of an experience placement, without really having any specific things I HAVE to learn from it. It was just an opportunity to follow them around and learn a few things
Things you can do to make your placement the best
- Do push ups, you will spend lot of times holding things, holding legs and tubes, and this could get painful so strengthen your arms
- You will spend a lot of time standing, do squats
- To reduced feet pain, invest in good shoes. I know my mother believes in me because she bought me shoes for medicine long before I got into medicine. To be honest I never really like them, I don't think they look very good on me because my foot is so large and I think they just look giant. She bought a pair for herself as well and they look cute because she is a smaller size. Anyway, I have not really worn them, BUT, after a couple of days of surgery coming home with painful throbbing feet, I dragged them out and they were amazing.
- My mom bought me these shoes, and I highly recommend them if you have to do a lot of standing, an absolutely tangible difference. They are so soft and they remain soft all day, just feels amazing and even pressure through out the foot!
- Tights, if you are a girl, wear control tights (again mom comes to the rescue) since mome is a nurse this is something I saw her do. After a few days I realised that standing for long causes excruciating pain in the thighs and calves, and control tights really help with that pain, definitely saw a tangible difference.
- Unfortunately it took a few days for me to figure out all these things, BUT on the last day I had on my amazing shoes, I had control tights and it was a practically painless day even though I was there for over 12 hours.
- I don't want to be a surgeon because
- walking into a surgery the patient is covered except for the location of the surgery to take place, literally reducing them to an arm or knee or stomach, etc
- Everyone's face is covered except for their eyes, which reduces everyone you are working with into functional parts
- as a very social person who enjoys the 'whole-patient' aspect of medicine, I really did not like this. I think I will enjoy teh process of diagnosing and trying to work out what is wrong with a patient, as well as treating and following them through, even sending them to surgery but later having to check how their surgery works in the context of their overall well-being. I will also enjoy participating in preventative medicine, dealing with making good health decisions and helping the patient through difficult medical decisions where I cannot provide an answer but only the available information.
- Sterile gloves smell like kapenta, probably not, but to me it was the most familiar label I could associate the strongly latex smell
- The smell of burning flesh was something I didn't expect, I don't think I like it...
- Most surgeons are quite nice and nothing like on tv, but orthopaedic surgeons are surprisingly like on TV (nice...but TV like)
- There is flexibility in their schedule and they get to go away for weekends and have dinner at home, but it is incredibly inconsistent, maybe spend three days straight at the hospital, and then three days getting to go home before 3pm, and then a day where you are at the hospital until 2am, it's just super erratic, I don't like that. I think I want a little more consistency.
Overall, an amazing learning experience. even though I knew before hand I didn't want to do surgery, I still found the experience extremely useful. I think it will be important later on to understand what my patients may be going through but also to understand my surgery colleagues.
Amazing
I am now reading Gray Matter (about a neurosurgeon who prays for his patients). And it's really helping my understanding of the setting and culture he is talking about.
The surgery culture is definitely distinct and it is important to understand it becuase I will be sending my patients there and in a rural area who knows what surgeries I will be doing.
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