The VSMMC Operating Room

I seldom talk about my nursing experience in this blog. How ironic for this is what I made this blog for, hehe... It's just that I feel there's really nothing special about my day to day experience. (I know, if there's nothing special about it, then I should stop doing this). But there's another purpose for this. I'm doing this mainly for myself. I'm using blogging for its barest, most basic purpose -- to log in my experiences as a nursing student. Sort of like a repository for certain things I want to remember or recall in the future.

Anyway, this week I've started my clinical duty in the Operating Room of the Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center. It was a relief to know that the experience is actually not that dreadful. We heard of certain feedbacks from previous groups, not only from our school, that the OR at VSMMC is the most dreadful place a student nurse can be assigned to. We heared of tales about surgeons barking and throwing pieces of surgical instruments at absent-minded student nurses. We heared of stories about shouting staff nurses. We imagined busy OR theaters where everybody has to work quickly and where the student nurse has to think and act rapidly to attend to the surgeon's needs. That's not how I found it, so far at least. We are fortunte enough to be assigned to the night shift, so most of the cases are emergency cases, and we don't have to make a pre-operative report of our cases. I haven't gotten my case yet (tomorrow I will). One thing that surprised me is how huge the OR room really is. It is comprised of 6 OR theaters (or was it 8?). And the things that I saw that were really interesting were caesarean section procedures, cranial surgery, dilatation and currettage, and bilateral tubal ligation cases. It's fascinating to see how layers of skin are cauterized. I imagined long ago that i'd probably faint if I'd see an operation being performed in front of me. My knees used to weaken at the mere sight of blood. But now I look at surgical procedures and I don't feel anything at all, just wonder, and sometimes sympathy for the patients.

Yesterday a woman gave birth, through CS, to a baby girl with a large lesion in her cheek. Her head was somewhat disfigured too (her forehead was protruded), and her left eye couldn't open very much. I don't know if it was only temporary. Imagine a boxer at the end of a brutal fight, that is exactly how she looked like. I don't know how it happened.

One very trivial thing, my head cover really feels uncomfortable. It's so small. It hugs my head so tightly that I sometimes wonder if I'm getting enough blood supply to my brain.