Day in surgery

We had our third to last day of clinic today! We got to stand in on two surgeries, a thoracotomy and a coronary artery bypass graft x 3. The thoracotomy was very interesting for me because the patient happened to be the gunshot wound I had on Tuesday. It was neat to see the patient progress. They were able to get about a liter of blood out of his lung...and that was after 2 days of having a chest tube in to drain! Hopefully this will clear him out. We looked at the x-rays and he literally missed his heart by centimeters.
Did anyone get to watch the new Office tonight? I was cracking up. It was a little much at times, but it was great to have a new episode!
I'm going to the salon tomorrow. I have my first hair appointment with Michelle! Very exciting!!! I feel bad for her though...I haven't even had a trim since November!!! Mom and I are getting our annual "Welcome spring" pedicures afterwards. I have a 15K the next morning, hopefully it won't mess up my pedicure!
TGIF!!!

Satisfaction

I'm currently at Methodist Hospital for clinic in the ICU. Today was a rather depressing day. One of my patients is over 400 pounds (down 200) and has been in ICU on a ventilator since November. My other patient was a gun-shot wound that came in last night. When I was getting report on him I thought it might be some exciting story, but nope, it was self-inflicted. He was with it today so it was hard seeing his kids come in and him mouth 'I'm so sorry' to them.
My third patient was an older woman who had been in Hawaii for the last few months and was starting to feel short of breath. So when she got back to Indiana, she went to the hospital and it turns out she had pneumonia. Long story short, she had to be intubated and this morning I was able to extubate her...yay! She did great all day, weak, but she did an awesome job. Her husband was there and we chatted a lot. Poor guy has been sitting next to her bed for a couple of weeks in an ICU where there's no one to talk to. When I was getting done, he asked if I'd be back tomorrow and I told him no, I'm back on Thursday but she'll be in a regular unit by then (God-willing). He walked over, gave me a hug, and thanked me. He said, "Thank you for the care you've shown with my wife and I today". It's sentences like that which make the extra student loans worth it.

Thoughts on the cost of tea in China?

Everyone's in trouble if I could ever find a way to post music on this thing. I have "Sweet Escape" by Gwen Stefani stuck in my head. I went to her concert on Saturday and it was great. Since then, I've had every song of hers stuck in my head. It probably doesn't help that I downloaded her CD and have been listening to it. I know, I'm acting like a 13 year old girl, but it lifts my spirits so I'll do what I want :-) Anyways, I was surprised. The tickets were $9 so I didn't expect a whole lot. JM went with me and we met up with my friend Tom from RT school and his friends. I ran into Courtney and tried to find her later...but boo hoo. Sorry, I'm off track again. Gwen was incredibly entertaining. We're talking costumes and choreography...the works. Best $9 I've spent in a LONG time!

Today I had my last day at this "particular" hospital till Tuesday. I definitely needed this break. I have to admit, today wasn't as bad. I had a MUCH better preceptor. An unbelievably better preceptor. And, more importantly, no prisoners!!! I had some messed up patients, but none of them displayed unacceptable behavior.

We had a couple of patients up in the burn unit, which is I believe the only one in Indiana. I must've sighed and said "poor guy" a million times. That's all you could do. The worst one we had was working and a furnace exploded. Over 90% of his body was burned...and burned down to the muscle. Do you know how they make your non-burned skin cover more area on your body? They cut it off and put it through a mesher. What's a mesher? Exactly what it sounds like. It stretches and meshes the skin. There were a few areas where they were able to do it on him and it literally looked like mesh material over him with those tiny little open triangles. That skin will grow fast enough and fill the triangles and now more of his open wounds are covered! Having so much of his body surface burned there is not enough intact skin to work with. They have to take a couple of his skin cells and grow them in a petri dish. After at least 4 weeks, the skin has grown enough to be put over some of the burns. It's this huge, long and expensive process, but it seems to work miracles. They had a lady in there earlier this year who was schizophrenic and poured gasoline all over and then set herself on fire. After 4 months in this burn unit, she WALKED out of the hospital. Amazing.

One of the patients had me cracking up though. I felt ok about laughing because he wasn't in pain and nothing was too wrong with him, he just gave me a much needed laugh. He's in the burn unit but almost completely healed. They can even keep his door open which means his body can handle the bacteria that could infect the wounds that are open. Anyways, we got a call that his level of consciousness was regressing and they couldn't figure out why. We did an arterial blood gas and the results showed that the amount of oxygen in his blood was remarkably low (normal range is 60-80 and his was in the 20's). This happened because he was breathing very shallowly and slowly, so his body basically just wasn't getting enough oxygen into his system. When that happens, you do start to lose consciousness and in this case, hallucinate. He had me rolling. When I first walked in he yelled "Why aren't they chasing you?" I asked him to explain and he said that the wolves have been chasing him for hours, but as soon as I walked in the room they sat down. I told him I had a special bond with wolves. While I'm switching him to a stronger oxygen mask, he asks me what I think about the cost of tea in China. No joke. I said I wasn't really sure and he started going off on the subject. Ok, even in my normal state of mind I could never come up with a whole conversation of the cost of tea in China. Granted, all that he was saying may have just been jibberish, but it sounded real to me! As I was walking out of the room I told him he needed to relax and take deep breaths. He told me he wouldn't have trouble doing that if the orange box with teeth outside of his room would stop staring at him. What was hilarious was he wasn't even upset by these things, just very matter-of-fact.

I guess that's my rambling for the day...I really need to go to bed. I have tomorrow off but need to run some errands and accomplish SOMETHING...ANYTHING. Then I'm driving down to JM's for the weekend and we're having a yard sale to get rid of his junk. Oh, sorry honey, I mean his treasured possessions which aren't going to make their way up to our new apartment.

Happy Friday!