TCH surgery

So here is a recap of the last 2 weeks of surgery that ended with Matt being the one in need of medical care. He was assigned to Texas Children's Hospital for the first 2 weeks. A typical day started with Matt's alarm at 5-5:30. He would have to pre-round and know the vitals and day's events for his patients in the hospital. He then would round with the residents and fellows. Next was an opportunity to scrub in on surgeries. On orientation day a nurse demonstrated how to scrub in with washing the 4 sides of each finger 15 times a side. Scrubing your palms, back of your hands and up to the elbow. If done according to her teaching, this would require 420 scrubs per arm. He found out later that this was, as you can imagine, excessive scrubing. The one rule is to not finish scrubbing before the surgeon. Once you make it into the O.R. with your hands dripping wet, you have to gown and glove up. The scrub tech. holds out the gown and you stick your arms in, then someone ties it in the back for you. Then you place your hands into your gloves. You are now sterile. The most interesting general surgery case he saw was a perferated stomach, but the most exciting case he saw was open brain surgery to remove a tumor. So, we will now skip to the end of the rotation on Friday when he was seeing patients and became sick and ended up throwing up in the bathroom. It lasted the rest of the day/night. We think it was from food poisoning (not Kara's cooking!), from deli roast beef gone bad. Today we had a relaxing Saturday as Matt was re-introduced to solid foods, such as toast, baked potato and chicken noodle soup. He starts in the county hospital ER on Monday.