Plastic Surgery Week

Yesterday was one of the most exciting days I have had since I started placement. I actually got to get involved in surgery and do some really interesting things. It was burns surgery, and I got to excise the skin for the skin graft and then mesh it. I also got to cauterise some blood vessels using the electric cauterising implement. Finally I got to glue the graft after it had been placed on. Of course, I was watched very carefully by the surgeon, and she did the major things (which could actually go wrong), but it was amazing to get involved and feel like I was doing something.

I also got to really help in surgery at other points this week. I got to do some suturing (stitches) of a wound, and also hold retractors to make things easier for the surgeon to operate. I actually felt useful in surgery, and the operating team commented that it was unusual for students to actually help out, rather than get in the way.

I've really enjoyed my week in plastic surgery, and I'm really grateful to the patients and doctors who allowed me to be involved and hands on in my training.

After my rant earlier this week, I also decided it was time to do something about my lack of work. I needed something to make it more interesting, so I went out and bought these:

They're really good, and so much more interesting than just reading a book. I can recommend them to anybody who is interested in how their body works. They start from absolute basics, so you do not need to have any prior knowledge to use them, and they work you through all processes or body systems step by step. They drawings are excellent and it is really easy to follow which areas you need to colour. They also really seem to help my learning by forcing me to focus on and think about what I am doing, and therefore focus on the reasons why something is a certain colour, and what is happening in each illustration. I have already worked through several pages, and I'm actually enjoying working, which encourages me to do more.

They're very thick books, a couple of hundred pages each, and very detailed, meaning you get an excellent in depth knowledge of the body from them, rather than just an overview. Obviously they do not tackle disease, only the normal state, but the knowledge of normal is very important, as it is only through understand what is normal in the body that you can understand what goes wrong in disease.