Surgery (2)

WOW!!!!!
It was a great day!

I loved my day in theatre. It was an early start to get there on time, but we arrived a wee bit early and watched te two cases prior to the one we were supposed to be seeing as part of the SSM. The surgeon, and thhe registrar were both very helpful and epxlained a lot about what they were doing, and even turned the microscope and TV on for the earlier cases which were adenoidectomy and grommet insertion and draining of glue ear.

Implant
We then got to watch the Cochlear implant, and it was great to see the things that everyone else viewed as normal, such as the care taken to make the incision as small as possible, and the neat and detailed drilling so that the implant would sit comfortably under the skin and slightly recessed into the skull. It was not like surgery is reputed o be and was in fact very gentle and the staff didn't seem arrogant at all - maybe ENT surgeons are different?

Wearing blue scrubs was in fact kind of cool, and got me some interesting looks when I went for lunch - all 8 minutes of it.

Scans and Anaesthesia
We were offered the opportunity, in the afternoon, to watch a child having an MRI & CT Scan as well as evoked Auditory Brainstem Responses (ABR) to assess their candidature for a Cochlear implant.

The little girl (M) needed to be anaesthetised for the scans, and it was amazing to see how she went from being happy (if deaf) 18 month old, to being a floppy mass of wires and tubes, with her life entirely in the anaesthetists hands. Because of the big paedatric hospital, little DGH like the one we were at don't do much paediatric anaesthesia, s there was an hour wait before M was sedated, allowing the registrar to pick my brain in a one hour tutorial on ENT, hearing impairment and my course. It turned out that he was friends with a Doctor who had done an MD and been Mr Tiddlywink's (a friend of mine) supervisor for his BMedSci project in my Honours Year.

The scans were successful in demonstrating that M had an intact auditory nerve. The EBR results were a mass of lines on a graph, and I couldn't even get a handle on them, but the Clinical scientists seemed happy that they had a result.

DIME
Of course me being me, a long uni day was not enough! I got the Bus to Train to Bus combination to be at DIME for 8pm, 110 miles away, since they were 2 Leaders short for DIME 3. Thus I got home 19 hours after I left!