Warning for the Easily Squicked: Today's update contains my impressions of witnessing cardiac surgery. If you aren't weird like me and so don't like the thought of heart surgery, please look away now.

Today marked the occasion of my third visit to the operating theatres.

I am officially in love.

Can I be a scrub nurse when I grow up? I want to do that. I want to do that a lot - I'm a little jealous of you right now, devida. Okay. I'm a lot jealous. ITU's interesting enough but really it's not where I want to be. I know it because I soent the first half of the day where I wanted to be and was fascinated by just about everything, which worries me a little. I spent most of the morning - from about half past eight to half past twelve (or maybe a little later) standing on a stool in front of a senior anesthetist staring into the opened thoracic cavity of a retired security guard with unstable angina, and I found the whole procedure absolutely fascinating.

I now know exactly what I want to do throughout the course of my professional life. By the time I left the hospital this evening I was already formulating a grand plan which, with any luck, should see me getting a job in this area within a year or so of qualification (most theaters wanting staff with ward experience before they go to work in that area). With any luck and several courses under my belt, I should then be in a position to try and move upwards. For the first time in my life, I have real ambitions. Once again, this is mildly scary. I never used to be an ambitious person.

I guess you have to know what you want before you can start getting ambitious, though.

Anyways. The procedure I witnessed revels in the tile of a CABG. Yes, it really is pronounced 'cabbage'. It's short for Coronary Artery Bypass Graft, just in case anyone out there was wondering what in hell cabbages have to do with anything. Outside of medicalese I guess that's the infamous heart bypass (though technically it's not bypassing the heart at all, it's... I don't think anyone cares, laila, just get on with the update so you can go get some food and rest up for work tomorrow. Speaking of which, I think I'm going to have to answer my comments later, I've got a regrettable need for sleep). And it's fascinating. What they do is they take healthier vessels from other parts of the body (such as the radial artery, which I saw dissected today) and graft it over diseased portions of the coronary arteries, increasing blood supply to the heart.

It's a pretty big deal. The sternum gets sawn apart and the ribs pulled open, which isn't nearly as gross as I thought it would be - it's actually pretty simple and tidy with the right tools - and the patient is kept deliberately hypothermic and ends up on a heart-lung machine for part of the procedure. And it's fascinating. I love being in operating theaters.

Weirdly enough, I've always been rather more grossed out by pictures of people with their ribs pulled apart with clamps and their chests opened up than I was actually looking down, from my vantage point on said convenient stool, into an actual human being's actual open chest. The grossest bit about it all was probably the diathermy, or rather the smell of the diathermy, but even that wasn't what I'd call noxious. I probably shouldn't have been surprised by how large the aorta is when it carries six liters of blood from the heart every minute but my God man, it looks huge when taken in context with the heart and surrounding structures. I cannot get over how amazing human anatomy is (we're like layer cake, or an orange with lots of distinct little segments, but infinitely more exciting than either). Drawings and photos just don't do it justice.

That said, it it is a little freaky to look at a total stranger's beating heart.

Go figure how I can't watch gory movies without feeling ill and having to turn away, but I can watch cardiac surgery performed in front of my very eyes not only with perfect equanimity but in a state of rapt fascination. Blood in movies squicks me whereas in reality it's just red stuff that transports goodies from point a to point b, and waste vice versa; for a lot of people it's quite otherwise, they think cinematic blood is cool, but real blood is squicky. I think I'd rather have it my way round.

And I'm going to go to theaters again just as soon as it gets arranged. The ITU staff nurse i/c students knows all about my new love and has promised to help me. Maybe I couldn't get a theater placement, but I will at least get to witness more surgery. And oh I can't wait. Because I want to spend the rest of my life in operating theaters. I don't care how long it takes me to get there - get there I will.

Told you I'd gone and caught ambition.