What Has Been Seen Cannot Be Unseen
Alternate titles for this entry included "I love the smell of burning flesh in the morning" and "Oh God, I'm so glad that patient is unconscious".
So yes, the inevitable finally happened. I finally donned my scrubs, fitted a disposable cap to my ever lenghtening hair and trotted off to theatre to get a massive (400,000 Gy+) radiation dose.
While my assignment to the hospital's chest x-ray room for two weeks was unsurprising (My clinical assessment is on chest radiographs), these last few days, it has been mixed up with a few quick visits to the A&E rooms to do something else. Feeling as though I was heading for another unexciting day, I opted to follow the on-duty radiographer to the operating theatre, where we quickly encountered an issue: Finding a pair of theature-acceptable shoes is very hard when you don't provide your own. Finding a doctor's welly boots (If you get the right artery, you can get quite a fountain, or so I've heard) that actually fit my size 12 feet is quite hard.
So, I had to settle for ankle-restraining size 11 and get on with it. I'm not even going to try to remember what ERCP stands for (Obligitory wikipedia link), but that's what I saw three of this morning. There's just something about the smell of burning that wakes you up when you've run out of milk and haven't had a morning cuppa. The fact this proceedure is usually done with the patient conscious (Sometimes anastesia is involved) is also a bit ew, since you get the sounds of the gag reflex going off and hitting nothing but a surgeon's trained hands and an endoscopy camera tube.
So, that finishes, and I depart for lunch, feet rather sore. I then end up returning to theatre, where I am suddenly prevented from using the boots I had previously been using by the surgeon they actually belonged to, and was offered an alternative pair of wellies belonging to another member of staff who was not in theatre that day, although the ankle-restricting issue remained. Then, I realised I should have asked what the proceedure was before going up to the department.
Urography. You know, the hard way of removing kidney stones from the bladder area. There are some places tubes should never be put. Ever. And that's after I saw three prostate exams during my last placement.
So Yeah.
So yes, the inevitable finally happened. I finally donned my scrubs, fitted a disposable cap to my ever lenghtening hair and trotted off to theatre to get a massive (400,000 Gy+) radiation dose.
While my assignment to the hospital's chest x-ray room for two weeks was unsurprising (My clinical assessment is on chest radiographs), these last few days, it has been mixed up with a few quick visits to the A&E rooms to do something else. Feeling as though I was heading for another unexciting day, I opted to follow the on-duty radiographer to the operating theatre, where we quickly encountered an issue: Finding a pair of theature-acceptable shoes is very hard when you don't provide your own. Finding a doctor's welly boots (If you get the right artery, you can get quite a fountain, or so I've heard) that actually fit my size 12 feet is quite hard.
So, I had to settle for ankle-restraining size 11 and get on with it. I'm not even going to try to remember what ERCP stands for (Obligitory wikipedia link), but that's what I saw three of this morning. There's just something about the smell of burning that wakes you up when you've run out of milk and haven't had a morning cuppa. The fact this proceedure is usually done with the patient conscious (Sometimes anastesia is involved) is also a bit ew, since you get the sounds of the gag reflex going off and hitting nothing but a surgeon's trained hands and an endoscopy camera tube.
So, that finishes, and I depart for lunch, feet rather sore. I then end up returning to theatre, where I am suddenly prevented from using the boots I had previously been using by the surgeon they actually belonged to, and was offered an alternative pair of wellies belonging to another member of staff who was not in theatre that day, although the ankle-restricting issue remained. Then, I realised I should have asked what the proceedure was before going up to the department.
Urography. You know, the hard way of removing kidney stones from the bladder area. There are some places tubes should never be put. Ever. And that's after I saw three prostate exams during my last placement.
So Yeah.