Today was day 2 as a sub-I (no, I will not be doing daily recaps, but this one was necessary). It was pretty hectic. There is my team (the inpatient gyn team) and the gyn onc team who have the same chief resident, but really have 2 completely separate services, for the most part. Today we had a patient that had a cyst on her ovary and it was unclear whether it was benign or malignant. So both of the teams ended up seeing her and consulting other services on her and everyone was getting so confused. Eventually we ended up operating on her and it was benign.
I actually scrubbed for the case and it started off well. He asked me what the layers of the abdominal wall were, and I knew that (I mean, a first year can answer that one). Then we explored some of the pelvic anatomy and I actually got to do a tie on a stick on one of the pedicles where we cut the vasculature to the ovary! That was actually the first time that I got to do some knots in a real patient. Pretty cool. The rest of the case zoomed by since the attending had to get to a VIP case that was following this one. Nonetheless, the adrenaline from tying a perfect square knot (I hope so) in a live patient made the rest of the case fly by, even if it was just suctioning smoke, retracting, and cutting suture.
Tomorrow, however, I will finally be faced with one of those ethical dilemma questions. My chief resident decided to put me in the outpatient surgery center to help/watch dilation & evacuations (D&E) tomorrow. I told her that i had never seen an abortion, and she suggested that I go so that I can get an idea of whether or not Family Planning is something that I would even be interested in. It’s pretty ironic, considering I didn’t talk to my mom for a week at the age of 13 when she decided to be a nurse at Planned Parenthood. I was so prolife, you couldn’t tell me anything. I attended a Catholic school for highschool and we had a debate for our ethics course. I had to do abortions, but had to defend it since that was part of the learning process to defend something that you didn’t personally agree with. During that experience, I learned of all of the sequelae from women proceeding with illegal abortion/self-afflicted abortions in states where it was not legal. After that I decided I was prochoice, but still did not want to ever see one or perform one. Now tomorrow I will be there for 6 D&Es and will have to decide what I will do. I really have to pray and think about this one.
