i know, it looks like something ray bradbury would write about, but this is part of the apparatus that allows patients to be unconscious during surgery. surgical anesthesia (an = negative, esthesia = of the senses or perception, as in AESTHETICS) is relatively recent development in the history of the medicine, being pioneered around the time of the north american civil war in the mid 1800s. so i haven't written in a while, been busy, but i've now finished my 2 week rotation in anesthesia at children's hospital of the king's daughters in norfolk, VA. i loved it. as a fourth year med student i was free to take as much initiative as i wanted, and in the last 2 weeks i placed my first endotracheal tube and quite a few more since then, on different sizes of kids. one day, in fact i had a patient who weighed in at 1.7 kg (about 4 lbs), and another patient who weighed nearly 70 kg (150 lb), almost 40 TIMES the size of my other patient! to give you a sense of scale, a 1.7 kg kid can wrap their entire hand around your smallest fingertip. crazy, huh? that's another miracle of modern medicine, that we can keep those kids alive.
i know, it looks like something ray bradbury would write about, but this is part of the apparatus that allows patients to be unconscious during surgery. surgical anesthesia (an = negative, esthesia = of the senses or perception, as in AESTHETICS) is relatively recent development in the history of the medicine, being pioneered around the time of the north american civil war in the mid 1800s. so i haven't written in a while, been busy, but i've now finished my 2 week rotation in anesthesia at children's hospital of the king's daughters in norfolk, VA. i loved it. as a fourth year med student i was free to take as much initiative as i wanted, and in the last 2 weeks i placed my first endotracheal tube and quite a few more since then, on different sizes of kids. one day, in fact i had a patient who weighed in at 1.7 kg (about 4 lbs), and another patient who weighed nearly 70 kg (150 lb), almost 40 TIMES the size of my other patient! to give you a sense of scale, a 1.7 kg kid can wrap their entire hand around your smallest fingertip. crazy, huh? that's another miracle of modern medicine, that we can keep those kids alive. 
1 comment:
nice post. a little history lesson always puts things in perspective. as someone who was one of those kids (ok, one of the larger ones on your spectrum), i too am thankful for this modern medicinal marvel :)
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