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| Being a nursing student, I get to see and read about some really weird and strange surgical procedures. Some bizarre ones, some surgeries that you just have to wonder, like how in the world did they discover this? Or why was this created in the first place?
I just found a surgery that is really strange. It makes me wonder, just.. what ?what where they thinking? Does this even work?
Cardiomoplasty, a type of surgery that uses the latissimus dorsum muscle, a large, flat, dorso-lateral muscle on the trunk, posterior to the arm, and partly covered by the trapezius on its median dorsal region, that muscle is taken, dissected free of it's distal insertion and is wrapped around the heart.
Wait... what? They take a muscle, and wrap it around the heart?
I kept reading...
For the next two months, after the muscle is wrapped around the heart, the muscle is stimulated with increasing frequency until it can contract in synchrony with each heartbeat. Six months after surgery, effects of an enhanced cardiac output should be evident.
...
This blows my mind.
But apparently this procedure has produced poor results.
NO WONDER!
Ha.. ha... so strange. The medical world is just weird sometimes.
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| I've tried this sooo many times.. how do you get back to writing when you don't have time?
Easy.. procrastination!
I really don't want to study, to work like I've been working these past couple of days, it's been intense. School is intense. In tents.. woo.
I have some specific topics that I want to write about, but I just can't get them out... these are what they are, but it's hard to actually sit down and write them out.
1. Edylady
2. First meal in India
3. Complaining about clinical
4. Thought process of doing things..
I just can't sit down and do it. Yet.
Yesterday I spend the afternoon baking 4 apple pies with my mom. A couple weekends ago we went apple picking and got four bags of apples. My mom spent the next day making apple sauce, and yesterday she made some more apple sauce.
I've grown up on homemade apple sauce from my grandparents apple trees. Those trees have died now, thanks to buggies, and my grandfather not spraying them or anything like that. But I still remember going to their house, and their woods, and picking apples off the trees, my grandmother having a knife and just slicing pieces off for us to eat. Always slicing them open so as to not bite into anything that wasn't an apple of course.
Thanks to having homemade apples sauce all the time, store bought is horrendous, I'll eat it, but it's just not good, I like the real thing.
That goes with jam too, I love homemade strawberry jam, another tradition our family has, thanks to my hard working mother, she's been the one to strawberry pick and jam in the hot month of July. Though, I did it too when I was younger, now I just go hide in the woods all summer long.
I love homemade things like that.
Thanksgiving and Christmas are filled with homegrown potatoes, or green beans, of course homemade applesauce, and others too. We always joke that one day we'll get our own wild turkeys too with my cousins bbgun.
Here's my lovely pie that I know you'll want a piece of. :)
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| Well, I've been at camp for three weeks now. And it's been a lot of fun.
Precamp was good, I feel like I spent most of my time in the trees, belaying people down the zipline, or just climbing up trees to jump for the trapeeze, it was pretty fun. But also a lot of work in preparing camp, I cleaned a lot of washhouses. Between mother daughter, and family camp, I cleaned a lot of washhouses, with Rachel mostly, it was great.
I had my first week of campers this past week. It was great. We only had 12 campers in the 5th and 6th graders, I had 6 of them in my cabin called chipmunk. I loved them all, we had a really fun week, and my girls really got to know each other a lot better throughout the week.
I got a teach archery to 2 of my campers and one of the other trailblazers. They were really good at achery after first day, and then I pretty much watched them, and added up their score together.
I've been running a bit too. I ran a couple times during precamp, and once during last week. It's been fun, and creepy to run down the davignon road, and then pickup trucks come rasing around the bends, at 635 in the morning.
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| I haven't blogged in awhile, it's been really hard to find the right mood, moment, and music where I can actually sit down and type what I want to write.
And then I have to decide what topic I want to write about! There's so many things that are running through my mind, school, India (which I haven't been able to properly think about since I had three speaking uh.. gigs? all on the same night unexpectedly), and other life things...
What do I want to talk about? What's on my mind at the moment.. oh so much.
This week I went to the operating room as my clinical rotation. On Monday I went to the PACU, the post anesthetic care unit for 2 hours. That would be a fun job, probably boring though, because the nurse gets to do lots of paper work for 2 patients at a time. And half the time the patients are asleep, from the anesthetic, in pain, so you can medicate them with narcotics.
On Tuesday I spent the day in the OR. From 730 till 1230 I watched an open heart surgery. Yes, that's right, OPEN HEART. It was insane, and insanely cool! I have never experienced something like that, not that many people can say they have! But I did. :D
I watched a coronary artery bypass graft surgery. This is where there might be some kind of occlusion or blockage in one of the coronary arteries which supply the heart muscle, myocardium, with blood. They're kinda important blood vessels. In this particularly surgery, they grafted three separate veins to the heart to supply the heart with the proper amount of blood it needs. The interesting thing was where they got these veins to be grafted in... from this patients leg. Yeah, that's right, they laproscopically took our a vein from the leg! A real vein! From the leg! That was very interesting to watch.
Then they opened up the chest. The cut through the sternum. The smell of cutting, burning flesh, not the best smell in the world. At this point I was freaking out inside, from excitement, or nervous energy? I'm not really sure. Cutting through the sternum, through the layers of skin, bone, in the chest cavity, passed the layers of fascia and connective tissue that surround the internal organs until you could see the heart. The heart, real live heart exposed to room air. Crazy I know! The heart beating, the size of my fist, the color of a bit lighter than skin, two feet away from me. Wow. God's creation is so amazing. The lungs right next to the heart, brownish.
I watched as the lungs were deflated, and the heart stopped beating. The heart needed to stop beating for the surgeon to properly graft the veins onto the very delicate arteries. The pumped all the blood out of the heart and lungs, into a machine that will do the work for them, supplying oxygen, and filtering out CO2, then pumping it back into circulation. It's amazing how we can do the work of the heart and lungs for them!
After completing the surgery, slowly the lungs and heart were reinflated? reperfused with blood so they could start their job up again. And then starting the heart, shocking it back into rhythm. Watching the heart be out of rhythm is like watching a bag of squirming worms, or at least that's what the anesthesiologist told me! ha!
Then sewing the sternum back up. Talk about traumatizing! They used very thick metalish wire through the bone, making the ends of the bone meet. Then sewing the inner layer of the skin together, then sewing the top layer of skin together once more. I think it will hold.
Talk about crazy.
And I haven't even mentioned the laproscopic bariatric lap band surgery I saw Tuesday afternoon! Now that's crazy.
I sure hope I didn't gross you out too much, even though, no one really reads this. | | |
| I went to see the movie Slumdog Millionaire yesterday. I probably would have liked it if I had seen if before spending two weeks in India. Why? Because most of the movies we seen, we'll never experience a life like that. It's easy to watch a movie for the reason of entertainment, without feeling the pain of that being a reality if it's a true story. But in this movie, it was still so real to me.
Slumdog is about two Indian boys growing up, and their life in the slums. It was hard to see some of the things they did in the movie, because I saw it in real life. I was berated with countless beggars on the streets of Delhi, asking for money, for food to feed their baby, just because I was a rich white person. They probably were not legit beggars, like in the movie, but came from someone who was making them beg, in bondage to make money for someone with power. They lived in the slums, they have no one to take care of them probably.
I also saw kids going through the trash dumps, just like I saw in the movie. There is a small trash dump down the road from where we live, where we throw our trash bags. One day when we were throwing the trash there, there were Indian kids, running after our bags, and going through our trash as we threw it there, because the house where white people live throw away cool useful things like plastic bottles. I even comprehend this.
There kids run around barefoot in the neighborhood I was living in, I drove past people living in tents that didn't look like they could withstands the rains they get in the summer.
How can I watch a movie for entertainment after I saw it in real life? How can I just sit by and let it affect me?
The worst was when they would come to the window of your car as you waited in traffic, and you couldn't look away because their sad eyes were just so piercing. How can you know they are legit, and the money you are giving is going to buy them food? And not making their "owner" richer.
Slumdog was a good movie, you should go see it, not because it's a nice love story of rags to riches, but watch it because people are still living this way, in this age of such advanced technology, people are still living on the streets. It's crazy.
I don't know what to think about this, this is just my experience and thoughts on the matter, I really don't know what to do with these thoughts now.
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