Needlepoint

If I was planning on becoming a surgeon, Thursday would have been like a visit to Disney World (where, coincidentally, my family is vacaationing right now).

I'm just going to throw that out there as a teaser, and pause to admonish myself for not blogging more often - I know I should keep up with it more than I usually do.

Anyway, I got to crack open a chest, literally. Our dissection covered the thoracic organs in situ, and how, you may ask, do we get to those organs? Previous dissections dealt with studying the stuctures of the chest - pectoralis major and minor and their related innervation and vasculature (medial and lateral pectoral nerves and the thoracoacromial trunk). This time around, I got to dissever the serratus anterior from its proximal attachments, revealing the midaxillary line - and then the anatomy professor came around with a bone saw!

By this point, I'm like a kin in a candy store - of course, this in no way resembles a real surgical procedure (they'd just do a thoracocentisis, not a complete removal of the chest wall), but it was fun nonetheless; the goal was to superiorly reflect the chest, so the cuts were made up the sides, and down across the xiphoid process. The part that I REALLY enjoyed, though, came after the professor with the saw had left - he neglected to cut some of the ribs. So do you know what I got to do? I grabbed a chisel and a hammer and went to work!

After that, the whole thing was a little downhill - I learned that lungs in situ are really quite pretty in a healthy individual; they have a texture unlike anything else in the body. My fingertipes are tired of muscles and bone, and my wrists still ached from dissevering fascia from everything else - the compliant sponginess of the lungs was a welcome change. I was a little annoyed, however, that this was an in situ lab - that meant that I couldn't dig around in the mediastinum and look at the heart - I had to content myself with internal thoracic arteries, and loads and loads of pleura.

Anyway, the hi-lite of the day was the suture clinic (schedules were changed around a bit after that last post). All told, I spent about 6 hours in lab, but that last bit of it was pure play. Nicole and I arrived and stood in line outside the lab while the AMSA members set out slabs of skin and little suture kits, slowly admitting students as the tables filled up. The presenter was actually one of the doctors who hovers over my table during dissections - this woman dissects like nothing I've ever seen, so I knew it would be good. She started out showing us how to hold the wickedly curved little needle with our hemostat (and lucky me - I already have several), and only showed us how to do interrupted sutures. All told, I only got in about four sutures; nevertheless, I learned a lot. I may be getting ahead of myself, but I feel like I can do pretty well sewing stuff up - although my sutures were a bit too close. It was so much fun, though!

What could possibly follow that? Well, AMSA had their Women's Fair on Saturday morning in Portsmouth. Some people measured BMIs, some measured blood glucose and cholesterol, Others (like Nicole) taught about breast exams and HPV, and I got to take folks' blood pressure. The sign-pus were funny - the AMSA coordinators (who didn't know that much, I thought) were trying to make very sure that whoever signed up for BP knew what they were doing - but I didn't have to prove my skills when I signed up. Anyway, we arrived to the Calls Centers on the main street in Portsmouth around 10:00am in a light drizzle. They had set up this little makeshift clinic right there on the sidewalk, and had folks just kind of clustered around. (I thought I could have run it a tad better - AMSA leadership may be in my future).

I've come to realize that being half-Jamaican here in Dominica is a plus, and it sure helped when I was taking BPs. Folks just seemed to open up to me, appearing to be very comfortable. Either that, or it was just very obvious how much I truly enjoyed that kind of thing - it was just like when I helped triage at the free clinics in Mexico run by the family practice residency clinic I worked for during a summer in undergrad - once again, it was just fun. I had a few people with high BPs (one gentleman had something like 170/132), and luckily there was a doctor on site to give them some advice. Directly after that, Nicole and I went for ice-cream at a little shop owned by the brother of the dietician here at Ross. Cookies'n'cream after months of no ice cream is like, dare I say, a kiss from God.

Unfortunately, the Easter service left much to be desired. All in all, though, it was what I felt to be an enjoyable, productive weekend.