So I’m not even joking about the title.  I’m going to be discussing my volunteer experience at St. Agnes so for the weak stomachs out there, tune into the next installment, but not this way.

Anyway, I’ve been volunteering every Friday now for three week at St. Agnes and it is pretty awesome.  I work in the Out Patient Recovery wing of the hospital, where all the patients who are being discharged that day go to wake up from the anesthesia and meet up with loved ones.

My first day there, I cleaned stretchers all day, stocked up the storage closet, wheeled patients out to their cars, and did a bunch of other boring stuff that is not very interesting so I’ll stop that train.

Second day, however, was great.  I got to shadow a surgeon who was operating on a patient’s cheek.  She had a growth near the jaw that had been operated on before, believing it was a cyst, and so it was not successfully treated.  So I got to scrub up and go into the room with them.  I stood right by the door because they told me not to touch or get near anything, so I didn’t.  The surgeon, though, was extremely awesome and so he talked to me a bunch during the surgery, and he moved me so I could actually see the entire operation.  He described how he was looking for her cranial nerve because if he accidentally cut it, then she would lose all feeling in her face!  So he kept digging until he hit a vein which started squirting blood out, which was honestly one of the most eventful part of the surgery.  After he cauterized it, he kept searching until he finally found the nerve branches.  At this point, he told me to move in closer, so I was literally within  6 inches of this woman’s open cheek looking at this mass of pink and then two extremely small, almost invisible lines running through.  He explained that they controlled the face, and then he took a probe and told me to look at her chin.  He stimulated the nerve and made her chin twitch!  It was soo awesome.  He then finished the procedure by cutting out the growth completely.  Throughout the surgery though, he was extremely amiable, not only to myself but also all of the other professionals in the room assisting him.  I point this out because we then move onto my third day.

So yesterday I was lucky enough to see another procedure.  It was osteopathic surgery on a man’s femur, who had had a hip joint replacement before, tripped over some tables, and broke his thigh bone in a spiral fashion so that, telling from the x-ray, he had twisted the lower half to the point it had to be twisted back into place before putting plated on the bone.  Everything started out initially the same, me standing in the corner beside the door, trying to avoid everything (the only difference was I was wearing an eye guard because they told me osteopathic surgery is extremely messing, and a lead apron because they took several x-rays throughout the surgery.  So I stood at the worse possible angle to see anything, and no one really spoke to me.  I was just there, watching blood being suctioned out of the leg, couldn’t see the huge gash I knew they put into the side of the leg or any of the bone he was drilling into.  i saw blood squirt when he cut a vein and screamed profanities, and I saw part of a muscle when he flipped it up to really dig into the bone.  The surgeon, though, talked to the other professionals like dogs, demanding things and screaming when anything wasn’t done precisely the way he asked.  It was actually a little scary.  I wanted to walk out because I couldn’t see a thing and this guy was cussing at everyone.  I stayed though, and one of the technicians talked to me a little when she wasn’t running around.

It was extremely weird, but I would say the second case with the femur was far more interesting than the case with the cheek, but the simple actions of the surgeon made it all the better for me.  I would want to go back and watch the first surgeon work, even if he was doing the same operation again, rather than going to a new, interesting procedure with the second surgeon, even if I could see something.  And then I reflect on the life lesson learned: if I become a surgeon, don’t forgot how to speak to people and treat them with respect.