Surgery Surgery Surgery!

Surgery Marathon!

Had a wild time last weekend.  Began a week ago last Thursday in Clinic.  I was on call for the hospital with my preceptor, a surgeon.  Starting seeing patients in the morning.  Got to about 18:00 and I thought I was done.  But little did we know that little appendixes across the fruited plain were beginning to burst!  ERs around the region began calling with abdominal pain a plenty, with an occasional abscess and colon cancer thrown in. 

So at around 18:10, just when I was thinking about what to have for dinner, a pager somewhere went off and any chance of sleep fled screaming into the night.   So, two appendectomies, a intra abdominal abscess the size of a softball (there is no way to describe that smell), and an abdominal bleed thrown in, I headed home at 05:30 Friday.  Then back to work at 08:00 for, guess what, more surgeries.  Six cholecystectomies, two sentinel node resections, another appendectomy, a vasectomy, oh, and my personal favorite: another peri-rectal abscess.  Now it’s Saturday morn at 0840 and I’m finally off to beddy bye. Five hours later and it’s another call, and I get to go in for some post op care, and to babysit a possible appendectomy fro a couple of hours.  Then off to watch my neice’s team win the state little league championship.  THEN a 13 hour ER shift.  This did allow me to miss my ward council meeting at 0730 Sunday morning.  It was like a nightmare that never ended.  But it was crazy awesome!  Saw and did all kinds of stuff; was lead surgeon on a gall bladder, my first bowel resection (I know, I know, it’s cooler than it sounds), first time I got to intubate someone (it’s where you stick a tube down their throat so they can breath), and some pretty cool ER stuff. 

So now I’m back to a normal sleep cycle, and now know what my optimal therapeutic range for caffeine is.  Without getting the shakes that is, very bad in surgery. 

So my last patient in the ER on Sunday morning shows up thinking that I’ll be a soft touch so early in the morning.  Of course she needed drugs.  Claimed that she was in withdrawl from benzos (an anti-anxiety class of drugs), because the DEA took her Valium away.  Now there’s only one reason the DEA gets involved and revokes someone’s prescription; dealing drugs.  At that point her story starts to go the way of two year old ricotta cheese.  Her little fake seizure didn’t help much either.  Soooooo, time to run a tox screen; our little actress came up positive for benzos (valium, etc), mary jane (cannabinoids), opies (synthetic opioids-oxycodone), and methadone.  Oh yeah, and her blood alcohol was .23 (legal driving limit is .08).  Guess what, now I call a social worker, and NO DRUGS FOR YOU!