6/25/12

I officially have 1 week left on the ship! It feels like it’s gone by so fast, but at times very slow. This experience so far has been AMAZING, but I miss my boyfriend, friends, and family and my big comfy bed! Anyways, I’m definitely going to make my last week on the USNS Mercy a week to remember!

Since I posted last, I’ve only got a few updates. However, some very interesting things have happened. With this being week 1 in the Philippines, we’ve had all new surgery patients and cases. With that being said, each day, two pharmacy staff members have the opportunity to go observe some surgeries. The day I went, I witnessed a routine hernia repair on an older man. The whole surgery took about an hour. We met the anesthesiologist and he explained to us that since he was elderly and actually had a cataract surgery planned for the following day, he didn’t want to completely anesthetize him. He received an epidural, benzos, and local anesthetic. During the surgery, he would open his eyes and kind of look around and it made me nervous! But the docs assured me that he couldn’t feel anything and wouldn’t remember anything afterwards. It was really funny because there were times during the surgery too when it would be dead silent and he would start snoring! The doctors joked that only an experienced anesthesiologist could do that.

Towards the end of the surgery, one of the nurses came in and asked me and the other student to come over to another OR because they had a tumor they wanted us to see. We both looked at each other, said cool!, and followed her over.  The patient was a 16-year-old girl with an ovarian cyst that made her look like she was 9 months pregnant. It was huge! They were at the point in the surgery where they had already cut down to the surface of the cyst. The next step was to drain some of the fluid inside of it so they could then remove the cyst much easier. They ended up draining 6 LITERS of brown fluid from the cyst!!! It was so disgusting but so awesome to see! After draining, they removed the rest of the cyst and it looked like a deflated basketball. The thing was humongous! The doctors were taking turns getting their picture with the cyst because they were so amazed by it’s size. As the were sewing her up, it hit me that this girl was a small, petite person who had been plagued with the burden of carrying this thing around for YEARS. It made it so clear to me that this mission is not only helping people with life-saving care, but changing the lives of those who couldn’t afford or didn’t have the means to do so themselves. This girl has such a bright future ahead of her and I’m anxious to see her recovery and reaction to her stomach size when she starts the healing process.

We were only in surgeries for 2 hours, but that 2 hours definitely changed everything this mission meant to me. It was a life-changing experience to witness those people.

Other than the surgeries, the days have been somewhat normal. I have been making more and more IVs and been enjoying every minute of it. One day, some of the Navy guys did a station exercise with practice problems set up around the room. There are about 8 students here and we took turns working through the problems and eventually went over the answers (it took us awhile since some of the questions were hard!). I really enjoyed this exercise because it made me more familiar with hospital pharmacy drugs and calculations. The guys here are great and most of them really enjoy working with us and showing us the ‘Navy way’ of doing things. Sometimes the ‘Navy way’ isn’t the most practical or most direct but it works for them here. Pharmacy operations are definitely different than the normal US practices, even though the government runs it. The software isn’t very new, there’s not a wide variety of meds, and you can’t just order something and it be here the next day, but the system works for the situation and is quite effective regardless. There are some glitches but it’s definitely been interesting to see their way of doing things.

That’s all I got for now! I go out for my MEDCAP on the 29^th and 30^th so I’ll definitely have some updates before we get to Subic Bay to disembark!!