Juxtapose

Today I went into surgery with my assigned patient. I saw the surgeon two feet away from me chop open a guy's belly, yank out his intestines, and grab out a foot or two to remove. The section removed was then promptly plopped into a surgical basin and sent to the lab for testing. The sigmoid colon, folks, is, in fact, much larger and uglier than you could ever imagine from the textbooks. No kidding. The little Indian surgeon was up past his watch-line in abdominal juices and globules of fat, all the while dicussing why he is voting for John Kerry. I suppose a job is a job is a job. So they splattered blood everywhere, yanked around, and I got to hold the oxygen mask on his face while the anesthesiologist told me everything I ever wanted to know about surgery and more. She almost has made me into an OR nurse. Almost. Besides the smell. But I think - I think - that I say that every time I run into some new section of nursing. I think I may just be burned out on med-surg already. Anyhow, after running around since seven AM trying to help prep my patient as a pre-op and do stuff for the nurses, they scuttled us off down to the holding room at the OR around noonish, and I still had yet to have a bite to eat. By the time we made it into the OR itself, the hunger in the pit of my stomach had stopped gnawing and my belly had assumed its familiar Tuesday steel-drum hollowness. My clinical instructor had told me to eat something before I went in, in case I might get woozy, but things were so busy that it wasn't possible, and the banana she offered me, unfortunately, is on the dirty dozen of food items that I'm REALLY not supposed to eat. I never did get woozy or sick, or overwhelmed, but after heading back upstairs to the post-conference and telling the quick version of my story to the clinical chicks, I left early to head to school and grab some food on the way so that I'd have a chance to both eat and finish homework five minutes before class. I left the conference room and took the elevator down to the wrong floor, walked down the hall for a minute until I realized that I was on the wrong floor. I then took the elevator back up to the correct floor and started walking the wrong way to the wrong parking lot on the wrong side of the building. So many wrongs in ten minutes that I'm ashamed of myself, really. After a few minutes of this, I looped back, got lost in the intensive care unit, and finally felt my way to my familiar base - The Elevator. I stood there for a moment, getting close to desperate for a McChicken at this point and was completely, utterly unable to think logically about which direction to go in, despite having navigated successfully the hospital for close to twelve weeks now. It was then that my clinical instructor and clinical girls popped out of the elevators in front of me and said, "Hey, we caught up with you!" I readily admitted that I had completely no capacity to decide what to do, and Kim grabbed my arm, called me "honey," and escorted me to the hallway towards the door to the parking lot, only a few doorways down the hall. I smiled at her in the way I only do when I've only had six hours of sleep, no food since a ritz cracker and a slice of cheddar at eleven PM the night before, and when I've been smelling necrosis of the colon, up close and personal, for three hours. And I thanked her and managed to find my way out of the parking lot to get to school, where I had what had to be the most delicious stale one-dollar-and-ten-cents bagel and cream cheese ever produced by my school's cafeteria before succumbing to The Class That Never Dies: Biostats. Then I went out and voted for Bush, although I was faced with a moral dilemma in trying to choose between doing so and voting for Al Sharpton. I mean, "Sharpton For Laughs 2004" - what could possibly go wrong in that scenario?

Oh yes, and my sister and I spent a most lovely weekend in Virginia before all this happened today.