Week 4: Surgery and Cologne Part 2

This week started off on an interesting note. We spent last weekend in Palma de Mallorca and were planning on flying back to Dusseldorf on Sunday, but because of union strikes in France, we were unable to make it back to Bonn until Monday morning. This left us (literally) running through the airport in Dusseldorf to catch the train back to Bonn, and then running to class from the train station in order to arrive somewhat on time. Nonetheless, we had a great time in our last pharmacology class on Monday. We learned about evidence-based medicine in the context of pharmacology and how physicians determine which drugs to prescribe. Learning about some of the biases that exist in scientific literature will definitely help me to think more critically about articles that I read in the future.

On Tuesday, we had the opportunity to shadow anesthesiologists at the teaching hospital in Bonn. I was in the oral and maxillofacial department and observed a couple different surgeries. One thing that stood out to me was the patience that the surgeons exercised when caring for their patients. They were having trouble waking up an older woman after her surgery, but they stood with her for thirty minutes, calling her name and rubbing her feet until she finally woke up.

On Wednesday afternoon, we went back to Cologne, and my group visited the cathedral. Something that I've noticed this summer is that every city you could possibly visit seems to have at least one beautiful cathedral, but the Kölner Dom is in a whole different league (which explains why it took over 600 years to complete). We took a fantastic tour of the massive cathedral and got to walk all around the upper levels as well as up to the top of the tower.