I can't tell you how much I am in love with my surgery rotation, and I've only been through two days of it. I'm at a small community hospital, 25 beds (that's pretty small haha) and it's set out on the ocean which is great. The two general surgeons I am working with are GREAT, such a riot. I've been going through all the departments in the hospital meeting the heads and they are super excited to have me around. I walked into the ER and they were like "Do you want to do chest tubes? Do you want to do central lines? etc" Let me tell you, those are advanced procedures that most PA or Med students won't have a chance to do, and they are offering them to me straight up!! The anesthesiologist is even going to let me intubate (!!!!!!!!!!!!!) when I've seen enough of them. HELLO!!! This is just going to be the best rotation ever...I am so excited to be up here.

Yesterday was my first day in the OR. I'm already good friends with most of the OR staff which is to my advantage. We started off doing a laparoscopic left hemicolectomy, basically a woman had colon cancer and we took out the part of the colon with the tumor and then connected the two healthy parts back together again (making an anastomoses). We also took out her gall bladder.Then we did a breast biopsy of a woman who had calcifications in her breast, and did an excisional biopsy of a suspicious mole. We then cleaned out a wound of a woman who had a breast biopsy done way back, but it got infected and was just pretty nasty overall.

And I actually got to ASSIST. I got to operate the camera for the laparascopy, retract, help the surgeon suture, etc. :)