Great day at the office

And when I say "office" I mean, the Operating Room. We had our general surgery rotation this afternoon. I know of only one group that has actually gone into surgery on these days because most surgeries are done at 8AM. Somehow once again my group was lucky. Our doctor called us in, told us to change into our scrubs and meet him in the OR. They were doing a rather simple procedure, putting in a central line. It's not very invasive but the good thing about seeing this is that before you know it I will have to do these by myself. I was glad to have the opportunity of seeing one done just to have some idea of the procedure. After the line was in the doctors told us a little bit about the patient. He was comatose from a car accident and the neurosurgeon was coming in later on in the day to assess him and see if he needed surgery. Keep in mind when I say THE neurosurgeon, I'm not joking. He resides in Barbados and is the only neurosurgeon from here to Antigua. That entails the entire southern Caribbean!!! Patient also had a terrible bout of pneumonia from being in the bed for so long. We then went with the doctors to bring the patient back to the ICU. The ICU is a room about the size of my bedroom with 2 beds and a nurse's station. It's tiny. We got to listen to the patient's lungs since he was on a vent and suffering from pneumonia. Then we looked at various x-rays and such. We then left the patient and the doctor took us to discuss the case. As we were discussing, the neurosurgeon walks in! I don't know how to describe it, but you could almost smell the arrogance on this man. However, I guess I would be arrogant too if I was THE neurosurgeon for about 10 COUNTRIES. Now came the greatest part of my day: the neurosurgeon's assessment of the patient. He basically walked into the room, did about 5 tests (all that we had learned in our Neuro class which were great to see on a real patient!). He finished in less than 5 minutes, said all that was left was prayer and then told every doctor and student in the room that it was a waste of his time to come. I WAS FLOORED. Talk about no empathy. Wow.
On a rating scale of 10, I give today a 9.5. Great day! Now I need to study.
~M