A cathartic moment as I was bringing a couple of the fledglings through a sebaceous cyst excision the other day...
I remember back when I was first starting out at an un-named district general hospital, and how the MO(S) used to talk me through the op before each op, and then observe me struggling and take over for a bit to show me a trick or two. I still feel like the same inept rookie sometimes, even doing something as simple as an excision biopsy - but I've learnt a few tricks through the years to make things easier for myself, and I know enough to guide my baby MOs back on track when they're so certain that sebaceous cyst with that almost unnoticeable scar-distorted punctum is a lipoma...
... and then it struck me that I'm the other guy now. Perhaps more patient than KR had been, or perhaps less. Perhaps spoon-feeding too much, or perhaps taking over too-often. I don't know. It doesn't really matter anyhow.
I thought to myself as I drove home how it feels like I learnt most of my basic surgical techniques in day surgery a lifetime ago, prompted along by veteran nurses itching to go home, and how lucky the kids are nowadays that we make it a point to always be there with them till they're ready to fly solo... and then I realise that one day those kids will probably be feeling the same way too, driving home from a long day's work, or not.
Learning how to do angioplasties today from M, realizing that one day I might well be the one teaching the rookie how to do something as basic as set a peripherally-inserted-central-line... something he said sank in through my haze of trying to look calm in the midst of my (hopefully) concealed panic and bewilderment at an unfamiliar routine - "they come back. They always come back."
He was talking about stenoses reoccurring in blood vessels, in arteries clogging up again after ballooning.
But somewhere in the disjoint mess of my head I know he's right - everything comes back in the end. Everything comes full circle. Life goes on, the scripts keep writing and unwriting themselves.
Friday, December 4, 2009
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