Cloud 9

So, I'm minding my own buisness saving yet another child from the terrible dangers of an ear infection when my preceptor (basically commander and chief of me for the next few weeks) says she's having surgery to remove her gallbladder today, so we were getting off early. Next thing I know, she's on the phone with the surgeon asking him if I can scrub in for the surgery. We finish our patients for the day and head over to the hospital. I scrub 30 strokes of a brush across my fingernails, 10 strokes across each of the 4 planes of each finger, and so on all the way up to both elbows. Then, I have people gowning and gloving me and all of a sudden I'm sterile and can't touch anything. So, there I am with my hands in the air not touching anything standing away from the table when the surgeon tells me to get right up next to the table right across from him...I'm going to be his first assist in surgery.

Like I said, I swear was just writing out yet another Amoxicillin prescription, and now here I am with retracters pulling open the skin of my preceptor for this surgeon. Next, he looks at me and asks, "Do you sow?" I reply, "Sure...on pig's feet." So, then he hands me a suture and I'm stitching up one of the openings of my preceptor!!! I don't think the school told us before we left that we aren't supposed to perform surgery on our preceptors...hopefully I didn't cross a line here.

Anyways, I'm on cloud 9 and can't stop smiling. I think it may stay that way all weekend. Hopefully my preceptor's abdomen doesn't burst open! I mean the surgeon was watching me, and I told him he could take the stitch out if it wasn't good enough...he said it was fine. I hope he's right!