After my series on Indian immigration from a female perspective, I thought I’d share some of my experience as a medical student over at UWI. Maybe I’ll remove some of that “mystique” from the medical profession?! I really do believe medicine ought to be more accessible – in terms of what it is all about – to the general public to whom it delivers its services.
I’ve just completed my first 4th year rotation – general surgery. And I can say, it was quite the shock to the system being plunged into the hospital setting after three years of sitting passively in a classroom being lectured. For a 1st rotation, it was quite tough being thrust into surgery right away, but on the flipside, it forced us to connect much more of our book-learning with real life bodies over the past two months. We saw a lot, we spoke to lots of patients and got a lot of hands-on experience. Finally we were doing some of the ‘real doctor things’.
It was quite difficult getting used to the long hours every day and to being “on-call”. Was this endurance training to prepare us for what’s ahead? But it was quite satisfying being able to help our team to make interventions that were actually helping patients. We were moving out of the theoretical realm into the real world. Finally! We weren’t just practicing to take blood from plastic dummies, we were taking blood from actual patients that would be tested to guide their diagnosis and management.
While it’s spreading like wildfire in the rest of the world, diabetes is already a major challenge in the Caribbean. Several members of my extended family from both sides are diabetic. One of the most common conditions we saw on the wards was diabetic feet. Some of the complications of diabetes are poor wound-healing, nerve-damage and reduced blood-flow to their limbs. Because of the nerve-damage, diabetics don’t really detect pain as well as non-diabetics, so if for example they stepped on something sharp and injured their foot, they mightn’t even notice the injury.
And because of the reduced blood flow and their reduced ability to heal, there’s a greater risk of the wound staying open and becoming infected. It was quite frustrating to see that some of the patients let things get so bad that they were left with no other option but amputation.
So if you know that you’re diabetic, make sure you’re taking your anti-diabetic medicine, inspect your feet regularly for any bruises or cuts, and try to not walk around barefoot.
Nothing takes away the glamour of surgery faster than actually spending time in surgery. For every “cool” surgery we saw, there was a peri-anal abscess to drain or a gluteal abscess to drain. In the happy event that you’ve never had to encounter one of those, I can tell you that the smell stays with you – it lingers and becomes absorbed (it would seem) into the very fibre of your being. I’m exaggerating, but I think you get the point.
For some reason Grey’s Anatomy never covered any of those things in any of their episodes!
But I quite enjoyed the structure of surgery. There was an order to things, a specific pattern of doing things.
I’m now one week into my second rotation – Obstetrics and Gynecology. So far it’s been rather exciting seeing newborn babies and hearing their heartbeats. It’s all I can do to keep myself from going “aww” and squealing when I see how cute they are. I have seven more weeks in this rotation and I’m quite excited about all of the new things I’ll be seeing and doing!
