Today, my passion and excitement to become a doctor increased tenfold. We took a trip to the university medical center where we shadowed various surgeons and specialists in their everyday lives. My experience was unique from anything I've ever seen or done which made the time even better.
Given that nobody in my operating room or prep room spoke a single word of english, I didn't exactly know what procedures were being performed which was kind of a bummer, but there were so many more positives to that heavily outweighed the negatives. Both of the surgeries I saw were almost the same, besides the second one being much more evasive than the first. The first patient was a woman in her mid 50's and I witnessed part of her stomach getting removed probably due to a tumor. They made a relatively small incision on her midsection and carefully removed part of the stomach. The procedure took about 3 hours but it did not seem that long at all.
The second procedure had the same outcome as the first, in the sense that part of the stomach got removed, but this time much more was removed. I heard the word "terminal" which made me think that the patient also had some sort of tumor or cancerous cells that needed to be removed. This patient was a man also in his mid-50's and I had the opportunity to do something really awesome, scary, and probably illegal in the preparation room. The anesthesiologist handed me the face mask and the gas pump and told me to put the man to sleep using the anesthesia he prepared. He showed me the proper methods for cupping the face mask and supporting the patient's face in one hand while pumping the gas with the other. Sure enough the patient was out in no time and it was probably one of the coolest things I have ever done. Next, in the operating room, they made an incision that went from his lower chest past the lower abdomen which was huge. They spread the two sides of the skin apart and the insides of this man looked unreal as weird as that may sound. I felt like I was looking at a cadaver but the fact that it was a real live human was surreal to me. I wish I had taken an anatomy class so that I could identify everything I saw, but unfortunately I hadn't. I saw most, if not all of his abdominal organs and it was quite a sight. They removed a large portion of his stomach which probably also had tumors and the procedure took about 3 hours as well.
I was shocked by the environment of the operating room when compared to a traditional American OR. It was so much more relaxed, less focused on sterility, and they honestly made surgery a fun environment. They were cracking jokes the entire time during the surgery and just the fact that I put a guy to sleep without any medical background shows how much more casually they treat the operations. Once again I was bummed about not being fluent in German because the whole time, the senior doctor was giving tips and methods on the procedure to the German medical students in the room and I was dying to know what he was saying. However, getting past the language barrier was a requirement to enjoy my time there and that's exactly what I did. Seeing surgical procedures in a German university hospital is not an opportunity that everyone gets and I'm extremely grateful for it.
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