Last Full Week in Bonn

     It's hard to believe that four weeks have already gone by! It simultaneously feels like no time at all since I arrived in the airport, and also like I've been here forever. This past week was the last full week in Bonn that we'll have, and since I didn't travel this weekend, I also got to spend Saturday and Sunday enjoying my last couple of free days in this wonderful city.

     This week started off with a really incredible experience, which was observing surgeries at the teaching hospital in Bonn. The anesthesiologist I spent most of my time there shadowing was incredibly helpful and informative, and I was able to see a patient coming out from anesthesia after surgery, a patient being put under, and a full operation on an infected hip replacement. Surprisingly enough, while I didn't feel too woozy looking at the patient's leg while it was opened to clean out the hip replacement site, what did really get to me was the tube used to suck blood out of the wound. It was basically exactly like one of those dentist office mouth sucking tubes, but you know, filled with chunky blood. I kind of had a hard time looking at it.

   For my first time ever shadowing in an actual hospital, though, I think this was an incredible learning experience. I'd never gotten the chance to see medicine practiced really up close before, and as someone who hopes to go into pharmacology, I'm very fascinated by anesthesiology because the two seem very intertwined.

Our lectures this week were also very informative. I had a lot of strong feelings about the lectures concerning healthcare in other countries in comparison to healthcare in the United Stated. Healthcare in the U.S. is complicated enough that even though I've tried to stay well informed on the subject, I really didn't know that much beyond the surface, and I really didn't know that much at all about the health care practices of other countries. So I came away from the lecture feeling not only more informed, but also profoundly angry with the state of things in our healthcare system back home. While it had seemed fairly clear to me before coming here that our current system is breaking down if not broken, it hadn't been clear to me just how much better other large countries are doing at taking care of the health of their people. This isn't to say that either of the other main systems we learned about are perfect, but they're clearly making the effort to afford everybody the right to medical care and appear to do a pretty solid job at achieving that. In comparison, it seems like we're barely trying, and that as a country we've decided that it's alright to let so many people go without proper access to medical care. It's frustrating, but as with everything, being informed is the first step in being actually able to take action.

Unlike my last couple weekends hopping around Europe, this week I stayed put in Bonn, which ended up being really lovely. Me and some friends hiked to Drachenfell castle, went swimming at the Melbbad pools, and had a really lovely picnic out at the big park on the Rhine near my host family's home. I'm already know I'm going to miss Bonn a lot when I head back home. It's really a lovely town, and I'm so glad I've gotten the chance to live here with my host mom.