It feels like each week is passing by faster and faster. After Norderney, I spent the long weekend in Rome, which was my favorite place to visit so far. We got to visit the Colosseum, the Sistine Chapel, St. Peter’s Basilica and the Roman Forum. Every new place we went left me in awe of how old some of the structures were. It’s one thing to learn about these places in a history class, but being there in person is a totally different experience. Pictures really can’t capture the true beauty and size of these places, so seeing them in real life gave me a much greater appreciation for them. I could’ve stayed in the Sistine Chapel for hours staring at the paintings. The long weekend was exhausting but a lot of fun.
Tuesday I was pretty tired, but I enjoyed our last German lesson and a couple history of medicine lectures. Wednesday was the day I’d been waiting for since the start of the trip - our hospital visit! I’d never seen any human surgeries before so I was really excited. The first procedure I saw was a colectomy. It was laparoscopic, so I didn’t have to worry about too much blood. The surgeons used the da vinci surgical system for the procedure, which was really interesting to watch. With this device, the surgeon is actually controlling the robotic instruments from a table on the other side of the room, rather than standing over the patient at the operating table. Seeing this technology in action was really cool because the future of medicine will definitely involve more of these types of tools. The second operation I saw was an aortic valve replacement. Being in the room while the doctors opened up the patient’s chest was surreal. I was able to stand on a stool at the patient’s head and see his heart beating in his chest, which is one of the coolest things I’ve ever witnessed. We got to watch the surgeon connect the patient’s heart to the bypass machine, which functioned as the patient’s heart and lungs during the procedure. Then, they removed the old valve and strung dozens of tiny strings into the aorta to hold the new valve in place. The surgeon doing the operation was so friendly and always happy to answer any of our questions. He explained to us what he was doing in each step and taught us the difference between biological and mechanical replacement valves. We even talked for a bit about the health care systems in Germany versus America. I feel like I learned so much from just a few hours at the hospital and I’m really glad we got that experience. Thursday we had a normal class day and then visited the Anesthesiology Museum. It was so interesting to learn about the history of something that we all take for granted today. Seeing how primitive some of the methods of pain prevention from the past seem in comparison to modern day methods was a little shocking. It made me sad to hear that when Dr. Stoeckel passes away the museum will close down, because I think more people should learn about the history of anesthesia since we all benefit from it. On Friday we had our excursion to Bingen where we visited the Hildegard museum. Getting to see some artifacts related to the things we learned in lecture was really interesting. My favorite part of the museum was the ancient roman surgical instruments. It’s amazing that such old tools look so similar to instruments used today. The boat ride on the rhine was nice to sit down and relax for a little bit and also get to see all the small towns along the river. The Marksburg castle was also really cool to see. I really enjoy getting to see how people lived so long ago and comparing it to modern day life. The view from the top was also great.
After our long day Friday, my alarm woke me up at 4 AM Saturday morning to begin my trip to Switzerland. We arrived in Interlaken around noon on Saturday. My favorite thing about Interlaken was the beautiful scenery in every direction. Every way you turned was a different snowy mountain or blue lake. We took a train up to the top of Harder Kulm (or Heidi Klum as we called it) and had lunch and enjoyed the view. After lunch we explored the town and had a pretty slow and relaxed day, which was a nice change after so many busy days. On Sunday I bought some Swiss chocolate and a Swiss army knife for my dad, then we went to the train station. Our train was supposed to take us all the way from Interlaken to Cologne, but about two hours in we hear an announcement that the train is no longer going to Germany. We had to get off that train and transfer to a “very high demand” train. Most of us sat on the ground for the two hours on this train. We finally make it to our “very high demand” third train that is supposed to take us to Bonn, but we get another announcement that the route was cancelled. Our fourth train of the day finally got us to Bonn, and luckily we learned a trick from a nice man sitting next to us that if you don’t have a seat reserved, go straight to the restaurant car. So we did that and luckily there was enough room for us to all comfortably sit on the floor. We got some strange looks but we were comfortable. I finally made it home around 8 PM and then had a nice dinner with my host family. It was a great weekend. Until next week!
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