On Monday morning we had class as normal. Two hours of the
history of medicine with Dr. Wasser. I’m pretty sure he is a human
encyclopedia, he knows just about everything. After class we went to the Koln
Zoo and had a private tour that was unfortunately only an hour long. Our tour
guide was going super fast, which was to be expected because it was a big zoo
and we didn’t have that much time. She kept saying that us Americans are too
slow and too lazy and we should be able to keep up because we are young. She
was telling me this as I was walking the same pace as her, keeping up with her
step for step. So apparently not all of “us Americans” were slow and lazy. A
lot of the group was extremely tired and some were sick also so I felt bad for
them. Our tour guide also went on to talk about how our food industry shouldn’t
be run how it is because its not natural and blah blah blah. I had to tune her
out before I got mad. Most of what she was saying was completely wrong and
biased, but hey maybe I’m biased too. After the first hour of the tour we got
to go to the elephant house for a behind the scenes tour with an elephant
keeper. He was really really nice and very interested in everything we had to
say and what we were doing in Germany. He showed us the in’s and out’s of the
elephant exhibit and we got to see them eating up close. We also got to see the
control room, which was awesome. I never fully realized how much work and how
much supervision can go on in one zoo enclosure. It really shows you how much of
a team effort it is to run a zoo.
On Tuesday we had to get up super early to go to the
university clinics. It was so hard because we are all exhausted from constantly
moving and never getting good nights of sleep. But never the less we were awake
and at the train station at 6:30am. It was real hard, I had to tell people not
to talk to me until I had some coffee. But I had some coffee and was good to
go. When we got there we were led to the changing room and had to put scrubs
on, including a hair cover and surgical mask. We all looked so official. After
we got dressed we were all split into different groups and we were each put in
different surgical rooms. The room I was put into was urology. The first
procedure I observed I had gotten in the room a little after it started and
didn’t get the full description of the procedure. One of the doctors in the
room did tell me that the patient was the department heads father, so I told
him they better not mess up then. He laughed at me. The procedure they were
doing on him seemed to be that they were just cauterizing some areas of his
bladder and then taking some pieces to do biopsies on them. That as much as I
got out of it and it only lasted about 20 minutes. The next surgery I watched was on a boy about
my age (beware this might get graphic, I’m just going to vaguely describe what
the procedure was) who had a torn/ dysfunctional urethra. They opened him up
and put a catheter in and got everything prepared. They then went in and took
out a big piece of his inner cheek to put onto his urethra to make it complete.
The piece of cheek they took was thicker in some areas than others and so they
had to pin it to a wax (I think it was wax, I didn’t ask) block to cut it down
and smooth it out to make sure the whole piece they were going to use was
consistent in size and thickness of what was already there. After they did that
they went ahead and just sutured the piece of his cheek to the part of his
urethra that was left and sutured it around (but not attached to) the catheter.
It was pretty amazing to see that you could just take a piece of skin from
somewhere, put it somewhere else, and have it to be completely functional
again. Before they sewed him all back up they tested it to see if there was any
blockage and of course there was not. It worked perfectly and looked pretty
normal considering. After the surgeries we got to eat lunch, I was literally so
thankful because I hadn’t ate or drank anything since 6 that morning and I
thought I was dying. We ate lunch in the cafeteria on their campus because
right after lunch we went to the anesthesiology museum. Dr. Wasser had warned
us about the anesthesiology museum and who did the tours so we would be
prepared for what was about to come. I drank another cup of coffee before I went
in so I would stay as awake as possible during the tour. The man who gave the
tour was the director and founder of the museum and he was such a cute little
old man. It was really awesome to have him lead the tour because most of the
instruments (if not all) were from his personal collections and he had a story
for every single piece. I zoned in and out a couple of times, just because it
had been a long day and sometime he was difficult to hear, leading me to zone
out but overall it was still very interesting. The even had an iron lung
machine in the museum, which I have only ever seen in textbooks before. The
also had a 1930’s style operating room with all authentic equipment. It was
fascinating.
Today we had a busy day filled with a museum tour, a rhine cruise, and a castle tour, but I am way to exhausted to begin talking about that. So goodbye for now!
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