Grey's Anatomy doesn't prepare you for this

This past Tuesday I went to the hospital near Bonn to observe surgeries.  Granted that I have been doing this for 3 years and I have seen so many different surgeries I was excited and ready and hoping that I would see something so interesting.  My first case was someone doing a peritoneal dialysis procedure so that the patient would not have to come 3 days to the hospital to do hemodialysis.  I did not know this was really a thing honestly and I was really confused because at one point the surgeon had his full hand into this guys stomach.  At this moment I was really glad I had a face mask on because what I realized what he was doing, my jaw dropped.  After the first case, the medical student who was there with me helped explain the medical school and education to me from her perspective.  It was interesting to see the differences and similarities between the USA and Germany.  Our next case had gotten pushed back because there was an emergency case that needed to be seen ASAP.  I was excited to see the emergency case because I have never seen an emergency case before and I was thinking about emergency medicine.  When I first saw the patient, I was not expecting what I saw.  I saw someone who looked severely overweight,  whose limbs were a dark purple and a ton of medication being pushed into his body.  I saw that there were staples down his engorged stomach and there was a tube coming out of his nose draining the acid from his stomach.  You could tell the difference in the atmosphere when this case entered the OR. The first thing they did was remove the staples and after they opened his abdomen, they took out his intestines and grabbed a pitcher of sterile water and started cleaning out his abdomen like a wash board.  I was in there and I was in complete surprise because I have never seen something like this before.  The surgeries I see are reconstructive based not something like that.  I think the part that upset me the most was the fact that this patient was only 32 and he weighed a bit more than me.  He was so sick that he looked obese and fragile.  He had apparently been really sick with leukemia and had gotten a bone marrow transplant and was put on major immunosuppressants.  Because of the extreme therapy, his colon had somehow lacerated and started to leak into his abdominal cavity.  This is what caused his septic shock and they were trying to fix him up.  He had a very little chance of survival because his body started to go into multisystem organ failure and the doctors had to put him in an induced coma.  This case overall was a horrible situation to be in and it was not something I was going to see here in Germany.  The way that they performed the surgery was also something I was not use to because I thought there would be a better way to clean him compared to taking out his intestines and leaving them just laying there as they poured water out of a pitcher into his cavity.  I am very glad that I was able to see something this drastic but at the same time I figured out that I could never do something like this.  It makes me appreciate my job at UTSW in the Plastic Surgery department more than before, I love my job there.