For any of you who have been wondering if I'm still alive, rest assured that I am. I may not have seen anyone or been much in touch with people in the last month or so, but I'm back. I've just come through a CRAZY stretch of work. Today is my first day off in 4 weeks! And I've been putting in really long days at the hospital every day, typically not getting home until 7 or 7:30, or sometimes even later. I must admit that my inner irritability has exponentially increased over the last few weeks, and I haven't been quite as pleasant to be around as I sometimes am. I'm still enjoying myself, though, which has helped me get through the craziness.
Backing up, Quebec was great. It was really nice to see my friends again, and fun to catch up with them and spend time with them. There was snow everywhere, in banks taller than me, and I'm told a lot of it had melted by the time I got there. I've never seen so much snow before! So there wasn't much outdoors activity happening. It was nice to get away, though, especially just before the crazy stretch I just finished. I've worked every day since I got back.
I found out fairly quickly that I'd passed my exam. It was very anticlimactic, actually. The notification came in the form of a 4-liner letter stating, "Dear Doctor. I am pleased to inform you of your success at the 2008 examination in Principles of Surgery. Your success at this examination will be recorded in your file and will be credited towards your final examination in a surgical specialty (if the Principles of Surgery examination is required in your specialty). Sincerely." I'm not sure why anyone in their right mind would spend $1000 to write this exam if it wasn't required, but there you go.
There have been a fair number of intense emergency surgeries in the last month, which partly accounts for my long work days. Some of them have been for bad traumas, one for someone with massive internal bleeding from some weird liver mass that exploded spontaneously and started bleeding (we still don't know what that was), and a few others, as well. There has also been a fair bit of the more "mundane" or routine stuff, hernias, gallbladders, etc. I'm pretty much at the point where I can do an entire hernia or gallbladder operation without being prompted through it anymore, unless it's extra-complicated. I've also done a number of mastectomies, and can do those pretty well, too, though once we get to the lymph nodes under the arm I'm still doing more assisting than operating. And I did my first laparoscopic (i.e. with the camera/telescope and the long instruments with tiny cuts rather than one big cut) groin hernia repair the other day, and it went pretty well. I've assisted with lots of them, but I hadn't done one before. So I definitely feel like I'm learning a lot.
On Monday morning I got to work extra early (around 6 a.m. instead of 6:30) because I knew that I had a lot of patients to see before our OR started at 8:00 and I would need that time. So much for planning and being prepared...at about 6:45 one of the nurses came out of our surgical stepdown unit (a halfway p0int between the intensive care unit and the regular ward, where people can be watched a bit more closely) and told me that my patient's heart rate was 170 (normal being 60-100). So I spent quite awhile dealing with that, until my chief got to the floor around 7:30 and she took over so I could write notes on all the patients I'd seen. That lasted about 5 minutes, until another nurse came out and told me that another one of my patients was almost unconscious. She had a bad infection that was kind of taking over her body, and was also possibly having a stoke on top of that. So I spent the next hour and a half looking after her, and didn't make it to the OR until about 9:30. Such is life!
The last 2 weeks I've also been dealing with dental pain that for the first week or so almost did me in. I had a root canal (the one I was sent to a specialist for) 2 Mondays ago, and found myself taking a combination of all kinds of pain killers to try to survive the next week until I finally bit the bullet and called the guy back. He saw me the same day, made a small adjustment to one part of my tooth that was sticking out too much, and started me on antibiotics. I felt like a new woman within a few days. It doesn't feel quite normal yet, but I'm not needing painkillers anymore. I've decided that dental pain is one of the less pleasant things you can experience in life.
So I have this weekend off, and am looking forward to having breakfast with my brother, who just got back from 3 months in Sudan, and sister in an hour or so. Then I work another 2 weeks straight, so that over a 6 week period I will have had a total of 2 days off (i.e. today and tomorrow). But then I'll have a change of scenery for a couple weeks. I'm headed off to Mozambique on May 24 to spend time with some missionary friends there for just over a week. I'm really looking forward to that, and would, of course, appreciate prayer as I prepare to go, and as I'm there. I'll be bringing my keyboard, and a lot of what I'll be doing is just spending time worshiping with them, which I know they could use, and frankly, at this point, so could I!
Later.
