Hello Everyone!
Link to pictures https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ZFaHtHUao5P8qhoFox3a8UXNnJDKxiYk?usp=sharing
This week faith and I started our operation room rotation. The OR rotation consisted of us observing different surgeries, learning about the different instruments, and finally assisting the surgeons during surgery. This week there was about 5-7 surgeries per day which was super fun to watch. it would be a lot to name every single surgery we watched but the most interesting ones were several C-sections, a couple total hysterectomies, a total hip revision, lap chole, live birth, total mastectomy, total thyroidectomies, removal of abdominal tumor, removal of pancreatic tumors, and lower anterior rection surgery.
The differences that I have seen between surgery in the Philippines vs back home is that since they have low staff here, they have nurses do all jobs in the department. All nurses are trained in first assistant, instrument assistant, pre and post anesthesia care in all patients (neonatal to geriatric), and cleaning the OR after surgery. All of the surgeons and anesthesiologists were really nice and wanted us to learn and know what we were seeing.
after the whole week of surgeries, faith and I had an earlier shift on Friday because we planned to use our 4-day weekend to go to Japan from Friday to Tuesday. So late Friday night we got on a plane with hunter from the FNRI group and we flew into Tokyo and landed on Saturday morning. the plane tickets were a lot cheaper from the Philippines than they would be if we flew from the US. on the first day in Tokyo we explored the city and took the train to the more city like area called Shinjuku. Japan was really clean and very quiet, which was a big difference from what the Philippines is like. we ate lots of sushi and ramen in Tokyo.
the next day we all want to Harajuku, which is another citylike place, that’s where we went to all of the shops and different tourist areas like the famous dog statue called Hachiko Shibuya and the Shibuya crosswalk which is the most used crosswalk in the world. that night we went to a park by the Tokyo bay and watch a sea lantern festival (thinking it was a sky lantern festival) for the national holiday in Japan called Ocean Day (Umi no hi).
on Monday which was our last full day in Japan we took a bullet train to Kyoto which took about 2 and a half hours, and we went shopping, ate some good food, and hiked up a trail up a mountain to go to a monkey park to watch and feed some monkeys. later that night we went back to tokyo and went to a pachinko place which is like Japanese gambling, hunter won $350 after putting in $7 and listening to a worker who was telling him what to do.
on Tuesday we only had time for breakfast and then we went back to the airport and flew home. next week at the hospital faith and i will be in the ER department for our last rotation.