Thursday

Since we are all done with triage, I went into the OR this morning. Going in there is like being in the Discovery Channel. Last year I scrubbed in on a gall bladder and got to stick my hands in the body to hold up the liver for the surgeons. I really wanted to do the thyroidectomy this time. I got to palpate the trachea and the crico-thyroid membrane with all the skin removed. Fascinating. The doctor told me, even with the skin all pulled back it is a difficult job to insert an airway into the membrane. There just isn't a lot of space.

Later one of the nurse anesthetists let me put in an LMA, which was very cool and very easy to insert. We may be getting them on our rigs in several months. While it doesn't secure the trachea, it takes no time at all to put in.

Post-op was slow with triage done and pre-op done for the day; there were more nurses than patients. I went back for the first lunch. I felt like I had nothing to do, but then I started looking around and while the things to do were not the big things, they were important -- getting water for patients, talking with them, making them more comfortable. I felt like a nurse. Imagine that. It wasn't bad. Say what you want about nurses, some of them here are very good and they have an eye -- not for what procedure can I do, but what can I do to make the patient feel better.

I did take care of one man in particular who I oversaw all post-op care for. An old man who all his life had a hernia, which was so big that when he walked in the day before, you could see it through his pants. The top doctor here kept saying "no more patients, but then someone in need would come in and he would say, okay, add him, add her. He is a great man. Anyway, the patient was so gracious and happy. He was a gardener for an old woman and she came and sat with him and told me how she had watched him labor all these years and how nice it was to see him without it.

A very gratifying day.

At night we were invited into town for a party thrown in our honor by the people who paid for our stay. It turns out they were the local version of the Lion's Club. They raised funds to house us at the resort and they all gave speeches and hoped we would come back every year. They had local musicians play for us and they served a big spread of roast pork and chicken and pasta and bread, and papaya for desert. The pork was fantastic. I told them I liked the skin -- cuerito -- so they gave me two huge pieces of it. So good, but so much fat.

I awoke in the middle of the night with a knife in my stomach. I was worried I had gotten some horrible GI bug, but I think it was just the pork skin and fat. A half hour later after emptying my stomach a couple times I was back to normal.