Today was a great day! I got to see a C-section this morning, and I also had a really great day in the clinic. And, to top it off, tonight there were some fireworks in town that I watched with one of my new friends!
When I was driving into the clinic this morning, I felt my phone buzzing in my pocket, and noticed it was my preceptor. He told me that there was going to be a C-section this morning at 8:00 (it was about 7:45 at this point), and was I in scrubs? I wasn't, since I thought it was going to be just a regular day in the clinic, so he told me to get to the hospital as soon as possible, put on scrubs, and meet him in the OR. The patient had really low platelets, which was why she was having a C-section. After scrubbing in and putting on more protective gear than usual (including shoe covers that went up to my knees!), we got ready to start. And when I say "we," I really mean that the surgeons and nurses got ready, and I stood there and tried not to get in the way! I thought it was going to be a relatively calm procedure, but I was definitely wrong. Because the mother had to be under general anesthesia in this case, they were racing against the clock to get the baby out of the mother before her anesthesia medicine reached the baby. At 8:50am, the two doctors began slicing into the abdomen mercilessly, and my preceptor even had to rip through some tissue at one point! When they reached the uterus, they sliced through that too, and then popped the sac that holds the "water" (like when people say their water broke), which went everywhere. The whole thing was way more messy and bloody than I was expecting! At 8:52, the baby was out and had been handed off to the team of OB nurses and the pediatrician. After that, the doctors tied the patient's tubes with actual suture string - probably where the phrase comes from - and then sewed up probably 3-5 layers of tissue on their way out of the abdomen.
After that, we rushed back over to the clinic because my preceptor was already running a little behind in seeing his patients. The actual appointments today weren't anything too exciting - a bunch of prenatal visits and annuals - but I was doing really well at everything during those visits. I love when a patient is describing her symptoms, and I can come up with the diagnosis before my preceptor even says anything that would let me know what he's thinking in the moment. At this point, I feel like I have enough experience and have seen enough cases (and read enough!) to accurately diagnose at least 90% of what comes into the clinic. That's a good feeling! Also, I was doing really well at measuring fundal height and doing the Leopold maneuvers (feeling the belly and figuring out what parts of the baby are where), and also being able to find the fetal heartbeat quickly, so that was gratifying as well. Overall, I'm getting much more comfortable in the setting and starting to enjoy everything rather than just being a strange mixture of terrified and excited all the time.
Tonight, I met up with my new friend who's also living in the dorm, and we went to grab dinner in town. After that, she taught me how to play cribbage, which was really fun! Then, we walked downtown again and watched fireworks on a dock on the river. It was the perfect end to a really great week!
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