There is no whining in the real world.

Well, the first week is over and all I can say is wow. I can’t believe how incredible this experience is turning out to be. The doctors and staff are beyond accommodating to ensure that I am learning and adsorbing as much information as I possibly can. Plus the ability to run in and out of surgeries is a million times more amazing than actually watching discovery health channel for hours on end. The behind the scenes action is so much better than the fake actors that look like they have fallen out of the 80s and then hired to reenact cases.

As for my actual summer immersion experience, I’m in a unique position where I am able to watch a plethora of surgeries since my clinician, Dr. Spector, is in the plastic surgery department. The sheer variety of patients we see in the clinic and the OR is mind boggling. Dr. Spector may have a patient in the morning that has a suspect lesion removed before moving on to a patient who needs to have a rectus femoris muscle (one of the four quadriceps muscles) free flap to cover an exposed aortic graft in the groin. The free flap surgery itself is so innovative since someone at one point must have said, “gee, wouldn’t it be useful to cut along the sides and the distal end (the end closest to the knee) of the muscle and then rotate it up 180 degrees, snake it up under the skin to the exposed area of the groin/lower pelvis, and then sew it into place?” Who does that?

What also has been eye opening is the amount of hours these surgeons put in. The clinician isn’t always slicing and dicing then going to play a round of golf. The plastics department doctors can spend 12 or 14 hours in surgery one day and then have a day where they spend part of it in the OR, part of it in the clinic seeing post op or consults, and then another part working with the multitude of projects they oversee in their labs. My time here following Dr. Spector has really been split between seeing his surgeries and the surgeries of fellow attending, early morning rounds, poking my head into animal trials, and then spending hours consulting with patients in the clinic. But nevertheless, every time I put on the green scrubs I always laugh to myself at how amazing the concept of this program is and how I got to this point. Of course that’s right before I remind myself in the OR not to touch anything blue.