As you may have gathered from the past few posts, I’m pretty excited to be a doctor! This year, and the next few years at that, will be full of “firsts” for me. Today, I had the pleasure of performing a male circumcision (from here out referred to as “circ”). Interestingly, I had never actually even seen one done! In med school, when I was on my Peds rotation at a private hospital, the Ob/Gyn team did all of the circs. Then on my Ob/Gyn rotation at the county hospital, the Peds team did all of them.
In preparation to not royally screw up this baby’s manhood for the rest of his life, I went to the best resource ever: UpToDate! Sidenote: I’m being slightly sarcastic, considering I know there are better resources. Anyhow, UpToDate had a great article with pictures and everything. It paid off because when the attending was asking me about what type of block to do, and what clamp we use, I knew what to do. Even better, it paid off for the little boy! I did work on my ducking speed when he started to pee like a squirt gun as I cleaned the area for the procedure. He shrieked in pain as I injected him for the dorsal penile nerve block.
During the procedure the boy didn’t actually cry too much. I managed to successfully circumsize the baby, with the guidance of my attending of course, with no complications. I will say, I felt so bad to be essentially operating on his penis. As I stated in my tweet, I’m not sure I could be a guy and handle cutting the foreskin off little boys. To make it even more interesting, turns out that I had to save it because they use it for eyelid replacements!
I was so excited that my first circ went well. Minimal blood loss… baby asleep by the end of the procedure… and then I get paged in the middle of clinic. Turns out he started bleeding! Luckily the floor team was to the rescue to apply pressure and achieve hemostasis with this special film. Whew!
Eww!!! Eyelid replacements??! Lol!
Hey. I found your website a while back, but I just started reading through it again, because I just recently made the commitment (at the age of 31) to go back to school. After catching up on 2 years of undergrad sciences, I’ll be applying for med school, and now that it is starting to become reality, it’s very refreshing to read all your posts again and get an idea of what I’m in for. Thanks so much for posting your thoughts and experiences!
Thanks for reading! One of my closest friends from medical school was a non-traditional applicant that came after working on Wall Street for 8 years. She had so much to offer our class because of her outside experiences. Best of luck!