Shifting Interest

Although the turtle like speed of my internet is the main reason for the slow pace at which this blog was updated over the past few weeks, there is another factor to for this – there are fewer interesting stories to in anaesthesia. Whereas being in the emergency department meant that there were a lot of patients with various interesting presentations and even more colourful stories behind them, I hardly get to hear any interesting presentation after moving to anaesthesia (of course the fact that most of my patients now have plastic tubes stuffed down their throats also contribute greatly to the lack of patient centred communication nowadays).

Take for example the patient that presented with chest pain at 3 a.m during my shift in the emergency department:

“When did you get the chest pain?”

“About an hour ago,”

“What were you doing at the time?”

“I was sleeping, then I felt this heaviness in my chest...” oh shit “...then I felt numb in my left hand...” oh shit shit “... so I did some push ups,” huh? What? Why?

“So when you were doing these push ups, did the pain get worse?”

“Yes. Somehow it did, strange.” Of course it’ll get worse! OMG!

About 2 minutes later it was apparent on the ECG that he had had a STEMI.

These days the interesting stories come not from talking to and observing patients but rather other from observing my co workers.

Take for example the surgical medical officer in charge of all the urology cases. This guy has been at his job for about 8 years now. He can be shit scary when shit happens or when he gets stuck with his stenting, but he is proper grown man who still reads Gempak (I honestly thought they ceased publication long ago), watches Bleach while waiting for his OT, and plays Starcraft 2. I mean, I simply can’t help but find such a person interesting.

The other day Miss Yap asked me whether I was interested in surgery. Apparently they did ask the higher administrators about whether they can get more medical officers. She said that the admin people told her I was interested in anaesthesia. I was torn. On the one hand anaesthesia doesn’t interest me as much as it used to seeing as how I actually suck real bad at it. However my bosses are really nice. I mean today my head of department actually came into my OT to help me reverse one patient. Also, the deputy hospital director seemed to have gone through quite a lot of trouble to get me into anaesthesia and I didn’t want to annoy him. He’s a really nice guy.

The big BUT is that whenever I see people doing a surgery I can’t help but feel this itch to want to hold the needle holder and tie some sutures!

Some of the guys here do appendicectomies at their own leisurely sweet time. I mean, one hour and forty minutes?!?! The damn thing wasn’t even perforated and the patient was a boy. Yes, perhaps the bowel was slightly stuck but once you freed it out how long did you actually need to remove the damn thing??!?! This guy took ages to suture and ligate just the appendix (funny thing is, he was rather fast at ligating the mesoappendix though). And how long does it take to close the skin of a Lanz incision no longer than 3 inches, with non absorbable INTERRUPTED sutures!!!! I mean that wound was shorter than his dick FFS!! What was this guy looking for? A perfect cosmetic result? Dude, it’s an INTERRUPTED non-absorbable suture. How pretty do you think the scar will look like? Hell, even Rashid can do a prettier subcuticular suture in half that time...

Well, that was just me venting steam. For now I will continue to stay in anaesthesia and see if my skills improve.