Honorary Gas Passer for a Week

This week the pajama posse have me scheduled for "specialty week". This week is often referred to by other students who have rotated here as "vacation week" since there is little in the way of actual responsibility and if you wanted to you could easily not show up and hardly anyone would notice. Specialty week is where a student gets to pick from among sub-specialties like urology, neurosurgery, orthopaedics, and anesthesia; to get an idea of what life is like in one of these fields.

I took the opportunity this week to hang out with the Anesthesiology Department- or as they are colloquially referred, "gas passers- owing to the inhaled anesthetics that they administer.

I managed to team up with a pretty good anaesthesiologist who was both laid-back* and likes to teach. I was in the OR mostly all day and did several cases with him including a couple of bronchoscopies, tubal ligations, and a hernia repair. I even got to intubate a patient- the first time I have done that in about 5 years- and this time I wasn't covered in vomit! He took some time to explain what he was doing, but mostly it involved a flurry of work at either end of the procedure and then most of the time sitting around and lsitenting to the monitor beep.

But don't take my word for it:





*Now that I mention it, every "gas man" I meet seems pretty laid-back- I'm sure this has nothing to do with the easy access to all those drugs. My guess is that every Anesthesiologist was, at one, time a budding surgeon- but who didn't make the cut because upon further scrutiny he was discovered to have a soul. (rimshot!)