From anaesthetic to surgery

This week is my 4th week in scrub and to say I was terrified and frustrated when I began was an understatement.

I had spent the previous 10 weeks in anaesthetics and had gained so much confidence and so many skills during that time, that it was really difficult to find myself back at the beginning again. On the first day, I found myself standing in theatre not knowing what to do. Surrounded by complicated machines and instruments with strange names and everyone seemed to be speaking a foreign ‘theatre’ language and I had no idea what was going on.

 

To ease my anxiety and to stop feeling like a lemon, I ended up checking the anaesthetic machine in theatre for the anaesthetic ODP. However, the scrub team on finding out I was new, quickly took me under their wing and so my education in scrub began.

This week was also my first Saturday shift. It was a long colorectal list with one of the more challenging consultants. However, despite my initial concerns it turned out to be really great. I scrubbed for some procedures and asked loads of questions which really seemed to please the consultant, who then decided to give me some real hands on anatomy training which was amazing.  The consultant and sister were so pleased with the whole theatre team that they treated us all to ice creams and Costa coffee which was lovely. So weekend working gets my vote, I left the hospital buzzing.