synopsis of last few days

I'm enjoying surgery. Plastic surgeons can do ABSOLUTELY AMAZING things and I am not talking about breast implants, nose jobs, etc. They also see all ages of patient's which I love - kids to adults. It makes it more fun!

For the last few days here's what I have been up to:

- did my first deep dermal suture in a man's buttocks, as we removed a pressure ulcer
- this man lying prone on the table (belly down) at the end of surgery "broke wind" as my resident stated this fact, the smell smacked us all in the face
- watched a jaw be wired shut
- a man who had multiple heart surgeries had a cavity/ defect in his chest wall that was not healing, so the plastic surgeon did a VRAM, this is a procedure where they take one rectus abdominus (half of your abs) and make it into a muscle flap, which then got flipped and placed into this chest wall defect - fill the defect and bringing with it a blood supply that will hopefully allow healing to take place (they also can take your rectus abdominus and make a breast post-mastectomy)
there is an figure of this at this website if you want to check it out --> click here
- held open a baby's little toe and the one next to it as the docs separated the 2 toes (syndactyl) and sewed a foreskin skin graft to the places where the toes had been connected before. His skin for the graft came from his penis - he was circumcised for this reason (not the typical place to get skin from, but it has been done before)
- helped removed a pressure ulcer and close it with a myocutanous fat
- changed multiple dresses on some large wounds
- smelled the sweet grapey smell of pseudomonas (a bacterial infection) for the first time, and saw the blue/green color it leaves behind on gauze
- broke the suture because the resident told me to make sure my knot was really really tight
stuck my hand in a little girl's body to pack a wound

been extremely tired, because it's hard standing all day, and it's stressful being in the OR worried about what you can and can't touch and trying not to contaminate the sterile field (which knock on wood I have not done yet, I have contaminated myself, but not the field)

there you have it - 1 week almost down
plastic surgery is awesome & I can totally see the draw into why someone would want to be a plastic surgeon, but....it's not worth not getting lunch at a decent hour and having my feet hurt from standing for too long and the long long hours