My Surgical Debut! Part I

 [Due to HIPAA privacy regulations for the hospitals and their patients, I can't give out any identifying info on the patient and I'm not sure if I can write about the actual hospital...so I will be as descriptive as possible without breaking privacy rules!]

Yesterday, I actually, really, finally got to watch a real, live surgery! Two actually! I'm still on a high from the excitement of it all! I went to *a major hospital in Daytona Beach* with seven other girls from my program. We arrived in the lobby at 7:50 am and I immediately realized that I had forgotten my lab coat. Holy crap. Not a good way to start the day, seeing as our instructors had drilled it into our heads that we MUST have our lab coats in order to go into the hospital. I started to break out into a cold sweat as our instructor stomped up to me in front of my new peers and demanded the whereabouts of my coat. I meekly told her that I had left it at home, and she seriously just glowered at me for a full, painful, awkward minute. If I had a tail, it would have been between my legs. Awesome, Erin. Great first impression. After her chastisement, she decided to allow me to enter the hospital but that if it ever happened again, I would be burned at the stake...or something equivalent.

We strode towards the staff elevators and all got in. I felt like I was boarding a metal spaceship to another planet. My heart was thumping in my stomach and my arms were tingling with anxiety. I seriously began to question what the heck I was doing. What if I faint? What if I get sick or knock over a tray or gag from some awful smell or...worst of all...what if, after all I have done up to this point, decide that I cannot handle being in surgery? What then? All of my dreams and hopes and plans would be for naught!

...Ding! The elevator shudders and we all step out into a foreign land. People whiz by us like cyclones as we are marched through a maze of doors and hallways. We end up in a locker room where we're told to hang up our lab coats for the day, as we won't ever need them past the locker room! Seriously?! All that just to take the darn things off? We follow our instructor to the outside of an operating room where a previous surgical tech student is filling out a form. He tells us that he'd be glad to take two of us in and I magnetically slide across the linoleum floor, away from the pack, to the O.R. door. Another girl bravely steps up and offers to descend into the unknown...

The tech explains that this is a ksjdhfkjsdf surgery and will involve ksjdkg langrnsk. Oh, and watch when the surgeon does the ska nefafj. Huh? Hable Espanol?


I silently follow him into the operating room, doing my deep breathing. Once inside, I scan the room and think that it looks nothing like on T.V. Much less dramatic and much more...human? There are nurses chatting and orderlies giving each other high fives and System of a Down plays loudly in the background, much like ambient music in a department store...but way more hard-core...

The room is filled with people. An anesthesiologist, RNs, circulators, techs, a nurse anesthetist and others swarm like bees around a hive. But suddenly, their buzzing quiets to a dull hum and the music is turned off as we turn to see a hospital bed bang through the O.R. doors. The patient is here! Here we go! 

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The rest of my exciting first-day-of-surgery saga will continue tomorrow night, as I have to go to bed now so that I can get up at dark-thirty tomorrow! Can't wait for another exciting day of lecture!