Day in the life of a surgical resident (Australia)

[Applause] [Music] hello everyone my name is serena and about two months ago i moved from the uk to australia to work as a junior doctor here in brisbane i've been here a couple of months so i thought it was time to do a day in the life vlog my morning begins at around 5 45 a.m with getting ready and making my morning oats although inevitably i never have time to eat them so they just have to come with me to work despite the bus stop being literally outside i seem to miss it almost every day today by some miracle i managed to catch it and so i actually managed to turn up to work on time for a 7 am start i'm currently working in what they call a low acuity hospital called stars which stands for surgical treatment and rehabilitation services got that it's super new and absolutely beautiful i mean i literally thought i'd walked into a hotel by accident on my first day the nhs could never bizarrely on a monday there are no patients on my ward being an elective day surgery unit not much operating happens on the weekends and most patients from the week before have been discharged so unlike any job i've done before monday starts off fairly relaxed this is great news for my oats and i as we catch up on paperwork and admin seems i can't get away from e-learning modules even 10 000 miles away from home a little later i get a phone call asking if i can assist one of the consultants in theater and i very happily oblige ready for theater in three two one magic hello so i've just come out of theater um we've done two or three thyroidectomies so removal of the thyroid gland which is up here in your neck um it is a breast and endocrine list so the breast surgeons are also endocrine surgeons it's it's a sort of joint thing uh in australia i think in england it's similar but the breast surgeons i've seen there in my hospital were only breast surgeons so i don't know how it works maybe there's different options but yeah it's a very busy day which is actually really unusual like i said at the beginning it's a day surgery unit so it's a little bit less busy a bit more straightforward than your traditional hospital where there's emergencies acute presentations and things happening i haven't got very long before i have to go back to theater so i will be eating so reasons to take the thyroid out would be uh if your thyroid is overactive so hyper active thyroid disease for example graves disease or if you've got a thyroid cancer that needs removing your thyroid glands are extremely close to your parathyroid glands so when removing the thyroid you are in danger of accidentally removing the parathyroids too your parathyroid glands release parathyroid hormone or pth which acts on organs like your bones kidneys and intestines to increase the calcium in your body if you remove the parathyroids you'll produce less pth and so your calcium levels may be low therefore in between cases i went to take blood tests from these patients to check their pth and calcium levels were normal suggesting the parathyroid gland was intact if not they would need oral calcium replacement so the next two patients on the list are for breast cancer so we're doing a wide local excision and i think a mastectomy not sure but basically we're removing the breast or some breast tissue uh as treatment of breast cancer um and that's what i want to do i want to be a breast surgeon so i'm very excited i won't lie with the thyroid cases i was very much just holding the retractors until my hands were cramping and i couldn't feel them anymore so i'm hoping the breast cases will be a little bit easier on my hands and perhaps i can do a little bit more like some suturing but i haven't got very long to eat so check in with you later destroying my fruit salad as if my life depended on it i headed back to theater for the last two cases for the patient requiring a mastectomy we remove the breast tissue and then close the skin and i was taught how to do some subdermal suturing which was very exciting we ended up finishing late but having learnt a lot and being able to come back to this magical nighttime view definitely made up for it the next day i'm back at it again with the bus stop and the oats i'm a creature of habit we start with a wardround of all the patients on the ward who were admitted the day before after their operations afterwards we get on with the ward jobs which mainly include discharging patients and also prescribing medications for patients downstairs in the post-operative area who don't need to be admitted but may need to go home with some prescribed pain relief to help their recovery after that it's time for some coffee something we've had plenty of time for on this rotation after we finished chatting in the doctor's office i mean finishing discharge summaries we head down for a quick lunch in this beautiful food court yes that is a sushi restaurant and a boost bar within the hospital after this i wander back down to theatre to discover new ways in which i can be more useless hello friends so just scrubbed in for a general surgery case it was a reversal of an ileostomy constipated a reversal of an ileostomy so this patient had a perforation of his bowel about a year ago secondary to diverticular disease so that's when you have sort of pockets of vowel outpouchings which can sometimes just exist with no issues but sometimes can cause symptoms and sometimes even cause pieces of the bowel to burst essentially you need to give some time for the bowel to rest when something like this happens because it's quite inflamed so you bring a piece of the bowel out and form a stoma and then a later date you can reverse it and put that back in and join the two bits of bowel back together so that's what we were doing today i didn't get to do too much suturing but i did get to use a leica sure like a shawl i'll have to look that up which is a sort of heat gun kind of thing which cut off the pieces of the bowel that we didn't want anymore and then i got to use this big staple gun to join up the pieces of the bowel that we do want back to one continuous loop got to help out a bit which was fun and the surgeon was quite nice too and was teaching me although he didn't call me by my name he just called me junior the whole time but he was perfectly nice so not too sad about that yeah so that's pretty much brought me to almost the end of my day today so i'll catch up with you another time before leaving i quickly pop on the ward to check all the post-operative patients are okay and then that's it that's the end of my day so thank you so much for watching i hope you enjoyed and i'll see you in my next video [Music] very hard to film in hospitals

Channel: Surina Taneja

Views: 234,366

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Id: yws5V99LeAI

Length: 7min 26sec (446 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 20 2021