After three long, grueling, educational and interesting weeks, I've finally completed my experience on the Surgical Oncology service!

The hours that I worked while on that service were some of the longest that I've ever worked while in medical school. However, I also saw some of the most intriguing things that I've ever witnessed during my time as a medical student and assisted with some of the operations in ways that I never thought I would be ever able to do as a student. Like, I was literally burning off connective tissue from the intestines at one point! (With guidance of course 😄) The operations that I got the opportunity to participate in ranged from simple and quick 30-minute procedures to complex and arduous 9-hour marathons. It was quite amazing to be able to cut open the body of a living person and appreciate the organs that keep all of us healthy on an everyday basis. Some of the tools that we would use during the surgeries were pretty cool too, almost extravagant even. I never knew there were so many surgical tools out there made specifically to burn flesh! Also, it never failed to blow my mind whenever we would see someone we performed a major operation on awake and speaking to us the very next day, as if we weren't inside their body less than 24 hours prior. Of course they had to stay in the hospital for some time in order to recover, but it was still pretty wild to have full conversations with them shortly after having literally touched their guts.

Overall, these past three weeks were hard yet fulfilling, and I experienced so much during my time on this service. The team I worked with this past week were filled with excellent people who allowed me to do more than I could've ever anticipated. I also felt like I had really gotten into the groove of things by the time Friday rolled around, and I could really feel just how much I had grown from when I first started Surg-Onc. For example, when one of my classmates joined me on the service early last week, I found myself informing her of how the service was run, how to perform tasks and present patients in a way that the team would appreciate, and the things that she could do to maximize her experience during her time in Surg-Onc. I surprised myself at how much I knew while I was talking with her, because I literally hadn't known anything about Surgical Oncology when I first started just a couple weeks prior to our conversations. I'm glad that I got the opportunity to participate in this experience and am even more happy that it was the first service of my Surgery rotation, because now I can look forward to having some more free time to study and get other stuff done. That's right, no more 4:15 AM alarms!! Well, only until I get to the Anesthesia service in three weeks. I'll have to be at the hospital at 6 AM at that time, which means I'll be back to waking up around 4:45 AM lol. But that's still 30 more golden minutes of sleep than having to wake up at 4:15!

Now that I've completed my Surgical Oncology experience, I can look forward to starting Ophthalmology tomorrow! I'm pretty pumped about these next three weeks because as you may or may not know, I've had a particular interest in vision care for a long time now. Although I'm now pretty set on a career in Pediatrics, I'm excited to be able to work alongside various Ophthalmologists and to fully immerse myself in a field that I had previously been pursuing for years. I'll also have more free time on this service to adequately study for the Surgery shelf exam that I'll be taking a little over a month from now. Now you might go and say, “Christel, that's so far away! Are you really pressed about studying for that test now??” And my response to that would be, “Yeah I know it's not coming up soon…but past experience in my previous rotations tells me that it'll be here before I know it! Plus, I've barely had time to even think about it these past three weeks, let alone study for it!” I'll definitely need all the free time I can get to prepare for it. I'll also need this newfound free time to work on SNMA stuff in preparation for the Annual Medical Education Conference next month (I can't believe AMEC is only a month away!!), to work on my fourth-year schedule, to work on this blog and to do other tasks that I've recently been forced to put off. I've already been able to use some free time this weekend to participate on a student panel at the annual Pre-Med conference that my school's SNMA chapter organizes each year, and as with every panel I've ever participated on, I thoroughly enjoyed it and was reminded of how blessed I am to be where I'm at! Oh, and I'm definitely going to be using some of my free time to make up for the sleep that I lost these past few weeks! I have a feeling that these next few weeks will prove to be ones that were worth looking forward to! *knocks on wood*

That's all I got for you today! Be sure to have a fantastic week and an affectionate Valentine's/Single Awareness Day! And I don't know about you, but I'm HYPED to go see Black Panther this upcoming weekend! Got my outfit planned and everything…😏

“Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds that you plant.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

– Black Man, M.D.