So our first surgery of the year has been completed, and it was as tiring as heck!
During this semester, I’m in Surgery II, which means that this time around, instead of learning the fundamentals of going into surgery, we will actually be conducting real surgeries on different systems each week. That means we always need at least a cat or dog to take care of each week of the year. Tuesdays are our pre-operative days where we run all the tests we need to make sure the animal is fit for surgery and then on Thursday we perform surgery on that animal if it’s fit. Every surgery team consists of 3-4 members, with the role of Surgeon, Assistant Surgeon, Anesthetist, and Nurse. Guess who I was? (Yeah, I guess the title of the post gave it away. ^_~)
Anyway, today we had to do a bunch of eye manipulations. As the nurse I pretty much went ahead and prepped and disinfected the area, helped prep the surgery table and also gowned helped out the surgeon and assistant surgeon with anything they needed. This included running around to get miscellaneous materials and also holding a penlight or flashlight in the region where they needed to help illuminate the surgical area. I had to run back and forth between the pre-op room and the surgery room because someone always needed something… and it was a hot day. The pre-op room and surgery rooms are air conditioned but unfortunately there’s a long hallway that divides them and because of that I was building up a sweat. For about 4 hours I was there in surgery hoping the surgeons would finish up. Luckily, we got out on time, but the rest of the groups kept running into problems (e.g. their animal started waking up from anesthesia, they couldn’t do the procedure right, etc.)
I had a fun time, but it was exhausting. I know I like surgery and all, but now I really understand how the nurses feel when they are running around trying to help the team out. I will never take them for granted ever again.
Now that I’m pooped, I’m going to down a few pieces of leftover pieces of pizza for dinner and chill for a bit. Catch you later amigos!
P.S. Here’s a little something I made up from a funny Filipino ice-cream commercial and some footage from our surgery. Enjoy!
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