Hi Followers!

As a preface, Cardon Children’s Medical Center is split into two different buildings: an office building and a hospital. The office building is where the clinics and the doctors’ offices are located, and the hospital building, as you can guess, is where the operation rooms and the patients being treated are. Once I received my observer’s badge, I was able to start going to the hospital with Dr. Vegunta, my on-site advisor, and his assistant, Jeanne. Dr. Vegunta took me to watch three different surgeries, the first of which was performed to correct a hernia. The second case was an esophagoscopic balloon dilation of esophageal anastomotic stricture with X-ray, which means the surgeon slid a long tube with a camera at the end down the patient’s throat, and then expanded a balloon through the tube to increase the diameter of the esophagus. The esophagus was initially interrupted, but the two segments had been joined in a prior surgery. We had to wear lead aprons during this, because the surgeon would take an X-Ray of the patient occasionally to see the positions of the tube and the balloon in the patient’s body. In the third surgery, which was the longest of the three, Dr. Vegunta removed an abnormal growth in a patient’s leg. All of the surgeries were really interesting to watch, and they showed how much of a team effort a surgery is. There are at least 5 people at work in the operating room, or the OR, during a surgery at all times.

One interesting thing I learned while in the OR is that patients are given 3 different types of anesthesia: one to keep them asleep, one to block any pain signals caused by the surgery, and one to “paralyze” the patient, which simply relaxes all of their muscles. Because of this last anesthesia, patients actually can’t control their eyelids while under anesthesia, so the doctors place tape over their eyes to keep them closed to prevent injury.