From operating room to emergency room to delivery room

A lot has happened here in Melfort since my last blog post!

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been here for four weeks already and I only have two left! I’ve been working with the same doctor for the past four weeks, and I’ve learned so much from her. She has been amazing about making sure I get to see and do as much as I can while I’m here. She teaches me as much as she can in between seeing patients, but I also get to learn just from observing the way she interacts with her patients. All her patients love her and speak so highly of her and that is no surprise to me because she is so caring, smart, ambitious, and friendly.

One day last week, I spent the whole day in the OR assisting with the surgeries for the day. A family medicine resident was supposed to assist, but he let me scrub in instead so that I could get the experience. I thought that was pretty awesome of him, to give up his spot assisting and let me give it a shot. Assisting was awesome; it’s a lot more fun than just watching and you get to stand on the mats, so your feet don’t get as sore! Basically, my jobs were to retract, hold and maneuver the laparoscopy camera, and cut the sutures for the surgeon. This doesn’t sound like much, but it also comes with a front row view of exactly what’s happening in the surgery, which is pretty cool. The surgeon was really good about teaching me as he went through the steps of each surgery, and thank goodness for that because otherwise, there definitely would have been times where I had no clue which structures were which or even which way was up! To be totally honest, it made me want to brush up (a lot) on my anatomy before I start my JURSI surgical rotation in September.

Another cool experience I had was a 24 hour call shift in the ER. That day was a whirlwind, with a little bit of everything going on. It started in the OR with an urgent C-section, and then most of the morning was spent seeing patients in the walk-in clinic. The afternoon and evening were spent in the ER seeing the steady stream of patients who presented there. I got home at about ten at night and went straight to bed. The night only consisted of getting called back in twice, so I was surprised to get a solid amount of sleep! How considerate of the people of Melfort to go easy on me for my first night of call! This was the first time I’d ever done any home call work, and it was a neat experience. It is kind of a weird feeling going to sleep knowing that your phone can ring at any second or that it might not ring at all.

By far the highlight of my experience here so far was getting to be involved in the delivery of a perfect newborn. One of my goals coming to Melfort was to get some experience with deliveries, so I was very excited that it finally happened! Once again, the doctor I was working with made sure that I got to see and do lots during the delivery and I really appreciated this because I truly think that nothing compares to the experience of hands on learning. To me, giving birth is so amazing because one minute you’re pregnant, just like you have been for the last nine months, then the next minute you have this beautiful baby to bond with and to love forever! People say all the time that birth is so beautiful, and I absolutely agree, I just want to clarify that I think they mean emotionally beautiful as opposed to physically beautiful.

Like I mentioned earlier, I only have two weeks left in Melfort. I can’t believe how fast the time has gone by. To any students who will have the chance to do PREP in the future, I can’t recommend it highly enough. My experience has far exceeded my expectations, and I could easily do this all summer. It’s kind of perfect that the program is literally called PREP, because I think that this is excellent preparation for JURSI.