I know you are all just dying to hear about our surgery course. Probably not but if I tell the story well you’ll be shaking your head or chuckling.
The course lasts 4 weeks, 4 Friday afternoons for 3 hours. The most difficult part of the course is your appearance. Everyday of class you walk down the hall hoping you’ll make it past all the check points. At the end of the hall is a round grumpy woman siting in her folding chair, legs kicked out, berating and turning away those that don’t make her cut. White pants, white scrub shirt, only the mexican mustache (aka bigote), short nails, the right kind of white shoes and short low volume hair for the guys. All of these requirements are open to some kind of interpretation none of us quite understand. I find it rather funny women are allowed to have long hair while Aaron couldn’t even get by with short hair because it had too much “volume”. Guess all prejudices in Mexico aren’t against women.
Once we made the cut we spent the first class watching a poorly produced video of a masked woman washing her hands while a man in the background called out orders. “Pinky finger, inside, outside, dorsal, palmer, Ring-finger: inside, outside, dorsal, palmer…..” (in spanish of course) We watched the video THREE TIMES until the power cut out and we were left in the dark for 20 minutes then dismissed.
Second class, we watched another video about three different methods of scrubbing in for surgery. It’s all quite regimented, there is a specific way of getting on your coat and gloves when you have no help, when you have a little help and when you have a lot of help. All of it is carefully orchestrated to avoid any unnecessary contamination. This time we get to practice scrubbing in. Instead of having an automatic soap dispenser we use a human dispenser and get to shout at our classmate to apply more soap every 20 seconds.
Third class, we watch another video! This one is equally low-quality and has Enya playing in the background. A tranquil cover for the fact that the video shows them slicing open the abdomen of a live rabbit, layer by layer, then roughly stitching them back up again. Ugh. Some students were very eager to practice sutures on live rabbits, signing petitions, buying rabbits. Fortunately the pet store ran out of rabbits before our turn to practice sutures came around. I think I learned plenty for starters by practicing on a pillow.
Our Surgery exam was this Friday. The task was to correctly complete three sutures on a pillow (mock rabbit). This part was fun. You have to hold the instruments in a very specific manner and do everything in a specific order. Apparently, you are not allowed to be a left handed surgeon either, grrr. It’s also a bit a test of nerves, even though I knew I could do the suture and my examiner was not particularly mean, my hands started shaking. I can only imagine how shaky one could get doing it for real, yikes.
Although the low budget nature and cultural differences lend themselves to a rather peculiar experience. I have to admit we were both pretty excited about stepping into an “operating theater” and learning the tricks that will serve us well if we ever make it back to East Africa as physicians.
