Love At First Sight

This week in the OR I watched a carotid endarterectomy and a femoral popliteal bypass, not to mention a colectomy. Oh, and a mastectomy and a hernia repair using the Prolene Hernia System. No big deal. Okay, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that even I had to Google some of this stuff - many of these procedures I'd never heard of ahead of time and had definitely never seen. Here's a quick rundown of what each procedure entails:

* Carotid endarterectomy - they make an incision in the patient's neck and cut open the carotid artery, which supplies the brain, and then scoop out all the plaque that obstructs blood flow, thereby reducing the patient's risk of a stroke. The patient is not put to sleep during this procedure.
* Femoral popliteal bypass - this patient had a large occlusion in her femoral artery (in the leg), restricting blood flow to her second toe and causing it to turn black and essentially die. The surgeons make 2 slits on either side of the occlusion, harvest the great saphenous vein from the patient's leg, and sew it to both slits, bypassing the occlusion and allowing blood to flow again.
* Colectomy - this patient had colon cancer so they had to remove half of his large intestine from his body.
* Mastectomy - this procedure was the hardest to watch, especially from a female perspective, because they remove the cancerous breast. The actual removal was done by male surgeons but I swear, it looked like every female nurse in the room was about to cry. It was the only time I've seen real emotion in an operating room.
* Prolene hernia system (PHS) - the hernia occurred in this patient when the small intestine poked through the abdominal wall toward the groin region, where it shouldn't be. The surgeon had to stitch a sort of mesh hammock (made of prolene) inside the patient's body to keep the intestine from falling where it shouldn't be.

While I thoroughly enjoyed my time in the OR watching each of these procedures (I hardly notice that I've spent 8 hours on my feet until I sit down and realize just how good it feels), none of these operations has captured my heart quite like the cardiac surgery I first saw when I was 16 (Ok...pun intended). During high school, a heart surgeon took some of the AP bio students to watch her perform cardiac bypass surgery and ever since then, I always said I would be a heart surgeon one day. I spent a month or so last summer shadowing that same doctor and watching more heart surgeries, just as inspired as ever, but this year I began to think that maybe I had latched onto one specialty too fast. Maybe I had only chosen to pursue heart surgery because it was the only type I had ever seen. This trip has forced to step outside my heart-shaped bubble, which in turn has only served to reaffirm that while the power of medicine will never cease to fascinate me, cardiac surgery will always have me wrapped around its finger.

<3 Vanessa