I decided today that I’m going to start a blog. It feels awkward to not be talking to someone specific, but it’s the end of senior year and I have some free time. It also feels incredibly narcissistic to just write about yourself, but maybe it’ll give me ideas on topics to write about. Hopefully I will keep this up throughout my time at BU, and maybe it will serve as a collection of memoirs. I’m not very good at writing, but I think that if I pretend that I’m talking to someone it’ll help me write this blog.
Perhaps re-capping what’s happened over the past few days will help me write. Last Saturday I woke up with a sore throat and fever, so I called out sick from work. Work! I’ll write more about that later. I went to the doctor and she thought I had the flu and prescribed Tamiflu , which it took a few visits to different pharmacies to find. A few days later I had pinkeye, and after that I got a sinus infection. Throughout the week I had finals and had to take Ibuprofen to keep my fever down. At least they were half days so that was good. Next Monday I have the calculus final but I don’t plan on studying for it. I’ve given up trying to understand Levin. Monday is graduation practice and Tuesday is graduation.
As for work, I hate it. Being a cashier is not very intellectually demanding, and I’d rather work in something like a laboratory or maybe even teaching. There’s a doctor doing some research at the hospital where my dad works, and I’m going to be doing some research over the summer there, but I don’t have a lot of information on that now. I hope to do research while at BU, especially paid research because it’ll count as my part of my work-study financial aid.
4 years seems such a long time ago, I remember being naive as a freshman, and I don’t think much has changed. I think I was not very motivated to do well in S/E - I know I could have done better, but after college decisions I think I might be too scared of doing poorly in college. I didn’t want to go into S/E, I could have done well in high school, but my parents would not listen since it was the only learning center into which I was accepted. In college I plan on doing more activities outside of just classwork. Like I mentioned before, I want do so research, but I’ve always been interested in sailing. I looked up the requirements for BU’s sailing team and they seem tough for me (treading water for 2 minutes, diving 15 feet) but I’m taking classes at the Y soon so maybe that will help.
I want to go to medical school, and later into surgery, but I’m afraid that I’m not smart enough or ambitious enough to make it. Even after being accepted into medical school, you have to apply again to residency programs, which are even more selective than the schools themselves. Residency is tough, and depending on the area of expertise, can range from 4 to 8 years, not including further specialization in fellowships or other degrees, like a PhD. I’m interested in neurosurgery, which is 8 for most residencies, and I hope to get into an MD/PhD program, which can total around 20 years (including college, med school, the PhD, and residency training. Check Student Doctor Network’s forums, they’re really helpful.
But, I think it’s something that I would like to do. Everything about the human body fascinates me, from how we develop both physically and intellectually to how our bodies fight off infection, to how we are able to sense everything happening around us. I think it’s amazing how surgeons can open someone’s skull, mess around with the matter that makes that very person a human being, and have that person emerge relatively unscathed (most of the time). Even surgeons in the 19th century, the height of surgical implementation in medicine, did not dare to touch the brain. I also like to do work with my hands - in 11th grade I had an electronics class and I loved putting together circuits. The attention to detail and the understanding you achieve in order to solder well were relaxing. Based on these facts, I think I would enjoy being a surgeon.
I went with my father to his hospital a few summers ago to watch a heart bypass operation. I remember going to the doctor’s locker rooms and putting my clothes in Dr. Seinfeld’s locker (yes, Dr. Seinfeld is related to Jerry Seinfeld. I forgot how but Dr. Seinfeld is a cardiac surgeon). My friend (he was also watching the surgery) and I put on the blue scrubs. They were surprisingly comfortable, sort of like wearing sleeping pajamas, but the sleeves felt too small. I guess that’s to help doctors and nurses wash their arms. The facial masks were very cool. I kept thinking someone would yell at us for wearing hospital scrubs, or someone would mistake us for med students and tell us to deliver a chart or a vial of blood, but nobody did.
There are two types of nurses in an operating room, a rotating nurse and an instrument nurse. The instrument nurse is sterile and stays throughout the operation, unless it’s a long operation, and (obviously) hands the surgeons instruments. The rotating nurse is not sterile (and can infect the patient) but handles everything else - answering phone calls, opening doors, or telling two teenage boys that if they feel lightheaded during the operation that they can rest against a wall. I was led out of the locker room by Dr. Seinfeld and told to wait for the rotating nurse.
A few minutes later a nurse walks by who took us to the operating theatre. He was very charismatic and I instantly abandoned my fear of not belonging in a clinical atmosphere. I forgot his name but for now we shall call him Bob. We talked to the surgeons who would be opening up the patient, before they scrubbed in. Even though I wanted to scrub in just to see what it felt like, I was too afraid to ask. (“Scrubbing in” means washing your hands with soap and a brush to become sterile and to reduce the risk of infection). They were already taking a big risk allowing unnecessary and non-sterile people into the operating theatre, and I didn’t want to bother them any more.
We then entered the operating theatre. It is important to note here that surgeons call it an operating theatre and not an operating room because of the drama of any surgery. It is a very well-practiced routine of “actors” (ie the surgeons) that end when the patient walks out of the hospital. Bob took two stools and placed them at one end of the room and told us to sit there and to not move. I turned my attention to the patient. She was an elderly woman who was already under the influence of anesthesia, and she was being bathed in iodine. Afterwards she was covered in drapes until only her chest was exposed.
I remember reading from the slew of books about medicine (surgery specifically) that I checked out from the library that this was to isolate the area to be operated upon - to disconnect the person from the body part, to isolate the human being underneath those drapes. You were no longer operating on Mrs. Smith, but on “the heart” or “the arm”.
Getting back to the story, the surgeons began crowding around her.I wanted to get a better look but I didn’t dare to leave my seat, lest I trip over the bulky wires running on the ground from machines hooked up to the patient and accidentally cause a disaster. Or that I trip and knock over one of the doctors. Or both. I can only surmise that they were exposing her sternum by cutting through her chest using a scalpel. After a few minutes I was startled to hear a very loud, harsh and grating sound. I thought it sounded like an electric saw but chalked it up as an auditory hallucination, a consequence of my nervousness. It stopped for a moment and repeated. Everyone else in the room was acting like nothing was wrong.
It turns out the surgeon actually was using an electric saw. I couldn’t believe it. He was using a power tool - the teeth of death itself, spinning at several thousand rotations per minute - only a few inches away from a fragile beating heart? I was half expecting to see a miniature version of Old Glory, blood spurting from a geyser, covering the room in a fine mist. But nothing happened. After another few minutes, one of the doctor pulls out this device that looks like it came from a Medieval torture chamber. Imagine two three-foot-long forks facing each other, with very long handles, and inch-wide teeth that go straight down at a ninety-degree angle. The surgeon placed the “teeth” on the incision site and turned a crank. I saw the patients chest open up like a picture in a pop-out book.
I don’t remember exactly what happened then, but later the head surgeon called me over to have a look. Bob had cautioned us to stay away from the instrument table which had a blue cloth holding the instruments, and it sat in the middle of the room. If we touched it, we would contaminate the instruments, and they would have to bring in a new table. Back against the wall, I slowly inched over the head of the table. The surgeon stepped to the side and allowed me to look at the heart itself. It looked like the size of a baseball and was covered in the kind of ice you use in a Slushy. This was to keep the heart cells alive while the heart was connected to a heart-and-lung machine (the heart is cooled, and everything slows down. This includes the amount of oxygen that the heart muscle requires, and there’s no oxygen reaching the heart while on the machine. This buys the surgeon the time needed to repair the heart. Of course it’s possible that the heart never starts again, which has always creeped me out) for the duration of the heart repair.
I looked over to the person on my other side. It was a med student, and I remember that her long eyelashes and makeup were in stark contrast to the uniformity of the surgical scrubs everyone was wearing. I also remember thinking that she was only a few years older than me, and that I wanted to join this profession that somehow seemed to be an esoteric society. Where else could you see the insides of a living person?
After stepping back, the surgeon resumed his work, and later began closing the chest cavity. He took what appeared to be a giant fishing hook and pierced the skin and the cut sternum. Attached to the “fishing” hook was a thick steel wire. He began creating a lace pattern with the wire to close the chest shut. I was amazed that the closure was so crude, but I realized that the bone would mend over time, and the skin on the outside would be sutured shut, which would help prevent infection. During the operation the surgeon asked if I had any questions. I had been in shock for most of the time, but I thought of a witty response. Thinking I was being funny, I asked if the patient could get an MRI scan or walk through metal detectors. The doctor, concentrating on closing the patient up, bluntly replied no. I guess he didn’t think it was funny. Eventually the patient was wheeled away and I left the operating theatre.
One thing I forgot to mention was the smell. After cutting open the patient’s chest, surgeons had begun to cauterize the bleeding blood vessels (to cauterize in a surgery means to close the blood vessels by burning them shut). The smell of cooking human flesh was present throughout the surgery. It’s not something that everyone has smelled or will smell; it sits deep in the pit of your stomach. You feel like you’ve swallowed a 10-pound bowling ball. Add to that the psychological effect of knowing that you’re smelling another person’s burned body, and I was glad that I hadn’t eaten lunch beforehand. It’s definitely something that takes time to get become accustomed to.
I think I’m done with this post, even though there was more I wanted to write. It’s 3:10 am right now, time to sleep. I hope this post hasn’t been too narcissistic =P and sorry for writing a novel. =P again.
P.S. I added the quote by Confucius because I don’t know how often I can post, but I’ll keep trying.
