Monday, March 12, 2007

Today was another 12 hour day at the hospital. But, I have to admit that time goes by fast when I’m there!

Our tutorial this morning with Dr. Miller was spent seeing respiratory patients. The most interesting one we saw was a pneumothorax (punctured lung) in a 65 year old man. Twelve years ago he was poisoned by a gas mixture of formaldehyde and potassium. He accidentally walked into a fumigation room at work while it was in progress and has had severe respiratory problems ever since. He was in very rough shape- bruises all over his body, tubes coming out of everywhere and very short of breath. He was also attached to a machine called an underwater seal (which allows him to breathe even though he has a hole in his lung). We got to listen to his lungs with our stethoscopes and it sounded like velcro being pulled apart when he exhaled.

After our tutorial we got another free lunch from MDA National (a medical insurance company) and then had a talk on hernias. We saw some really crazy pictures that I wish I could show! (Search “inguinal hernia” on google images if you are curious- but beware!)

In the afternoon we worked on some more clinical skills (like washing hands and wearing masks) and talked about contact, droplet and airborne transmission. We also got fitted with N-95 masks which are used when you come into contact with anyone who might have an airborne disease (such as SARS).

We finished pretty early today, so instead of going home we decided to go and see if we could get inside the surgery ward. The receptionist at the ward had already turned down one group of students who tried to get in, so Nick thought we should just go through the changerooms and see if the doctors would let us in. So we did! We changed into scrubs, put covers on our shoes, hats on our heads and headed up into the surgery ward. We wandered around for a bit and found some interesting cases on the white board. We thought we’d only be able to watch from the scrub rooms, but the doctors were always more than happy to have us come right in. We had to wear masks (and gloves if we wanted to touch anything)- which was (along with pretty much EVERYTHING else) extraordinarily different from the standards in the operating rooms in India!

We watched a little bit of an ectopic pregnancy operation and a bit of an operation to remove part of a man’s lung (who had lung cancer). For most of the time though, we were in an operation to remove a giant malignant testicular tumour from a 17-year old boy. They cut the whole tumour out of him and then put a prosthetic testicle back in. We saw the whole operation from beginning to end and also spent a while talking to the anesthetist (who seemed happy to talk to us rather than reading his novel).

We didn’t end up leaving the hospital till well after 5pm, so I didn’t get home till around 7pm. I went to King St. to get some sushi with Sabiha and now I’m heading to bed since I have another 12 hour day tomorrow!

Miss you guys!! Thanks for the emails :)

Here are a few more pictures from Janice-... @ Cronulla Beach again.