Out of area placements

The last few weeks, my life as a student midwife has taken me way out of my comfort zone. When you study midwifery at City, you are given the opportunity to explore some out-of-area clinical settings with the idea that we are able to appreciate how we work in a multidisciplinary team and to further broaden our knowledge of the human body and how it all functions. For this weeks blog I am going to tell you all about my experiences of one of these out-of-area placement and what I learnt whilst I was there.

Theatres.

Before I decided I wanted to deliver babies for the rest of my life, I had considered being a surgeon and so my time spent in operating theatres has really allowed me to indulge in that fantasy. The hospital I work in has 5 main fields of operating services; gynaecology (so elective or “planned” C-sections, emergency C-sections, hysterectomy’s – removal of the uterus, myomectomy’s, diagnostic laparoscopy’s and lots of other big words I don’t really understand), trauma (so removal of appendix’, repairing wrist and hip fractures), urology  (cystoscopy’s where the surgeon looks inside the lower urinary tract), bariatric surgery (gastric bands and other weight loss surgery’s) and orthopaedics (basically anything bone). Although my legs and back were weak from standing up for what felt like 2 weeks straight I absolutely loved my time there! The surgeons were fantastic at explaining everything they were doing and why as well as showing me just how the body looks inside! I had the pleasure of working with some fantastic anesthetists whose job it is to make sure the patients feel no pain during the operation. This may include putting them to sleep or inserting an epidural which is a tube in the spine of which a drug is inserted in order to make the patient numb in the necessary area so they may stay awake during the procedure. Throughout my time there I learnt a lot about consent of the patient seeing doctors revalidating consent with the patient themselves at least 3 times before the operation begun. I worked in an area called recovery which is where patients are taken once their operation is finished and the nurses there took me through all the different medications they used and how they monitored the patients before sending them to the ward. To see the insides of someone else surprisingly had little effect on me- possibly because of all the babies I’ve seen born but I did have to step out of the theatres for one operation as it was a tooth one and after years of orthodontic treatment in my childhood it felt a bit close to home! In those two weeks I learnt 3 main lessons about myself;

Lesson 1; our bowels are massive- like enormous! I saw a bowel obstruction being repaired and in order to do the operation they had to excavate his entire bowel out of his body- when the surgeon told me it was his bowel I couldn’t believe it- it could have easily been his entire intestinal system for all I knew!

Lesson 2; I am not grossed out by blood. Like not even a little bit. Amazing really since 3 years ago id skip the operating scenes in causality.

Lesson 3; I would never have made it as doctor. The amount of knowledge these surgeons and anaesthetists have is intimidating and yet incredibly admirable at the same time. I loved living life in theatres for the time I was there but I think I’ll stick to my midwifery for now.