Today, I began my surgery rotation.  At 7:30am, three Humanities and Medicine students and I met the attending physician in the hospital lobby. I’ve never been squeamish around blood or the other gory aspects of the body, so when Dr. Steinhagen sat down with the four students doing surgery rotations this week and provided us with advice about what to do if we became nauseous, or started to black out (and even when he warned that this is more frequent than one might guess), I never anticipated these words of wisdom might apply to me.

Upon entering the O.R., I was overwhelmed by a sense of wonder and excitement.  Patients were being wheeled down the hallways, doctors and nurses scurried from place to place in hairnets and scrubs, and hidden just out of view, in various rooms on the floor, a handful of people were experiencing one of the most significant and potentially nerve-wracking days of their lives. Patients waited on stretchers, about to enter what would hopefully be a life-saving, or life-improving, operation.

After looking at the schedule, Dr. Steinhagen presented each of us with the dynamic and multi-faceted schedule for the day – including vascular surgery (removing plaque from the carotid artery), a pancreas removal, and a colon-repair operation.  At the end, I was assigned to my first choice: I would watch the laparoscopic removal of the kidney from a live donor, and then “follow the kidney down the hall” to see the freshly removed organ transplanted into the recipient.  Dr. Steinhagen escorted me, and I shortly entered an operating room for the first time.

The donor’s surgery was a precise display of incredible technology: with laparoscopic surgery, the doctor places a tiny camera inside the patient’s abdomen, so that all of the internal organs can be seen as procedures are meticulously performed through tiny incisions.  I was amazed by the images on the monitors, as the doctors’ instruments, and the camera, passed through the epidermis and layers of connective tissue, then pulled back the liver to reveal the kidney.

The operating room is kept a cool temperature, preventing heat from the lights and bodies of medical personnel from making the room uncomfortably warm.  However, at one moment during the operation, the coolness dissipated.  I felt myself grow hot, but internally, as I imagined a hot flash might feel.  Shortly thereafter, I began to feel nauseous.  I tried to fight the sensation, but the edges of my vision started to fade to black.  In this moment, Dr. Steinhagen’s words rang through my head:  “if you begin to feel faint, simply sit on the floor.  Do not be embarrassed.  This happens to many people their first time.”

The doctor needn’t have worried; there was no time to grow embarrassed.  Following his advice, I crouched down, giving myself a moment for these sensations to subside.  Fortunately, only slightly less quickly than it struck, the entire visceral response melted away.  After just a moment, feeling back to normal, I stood up again, and resumed watching the surgery, intrigued.

Things grew even more exciting as the donor kidney was removed, and a second surgeon entered to help prepare the organ for transplantation.  Then, he quickly whisked the ice-packed kidney down the hallway, and into another operating room to transplant the organ into the recipient.  After scrubbing in, I watched with wonder as the kidney was prepared, and then expertly integrated into the patient’s body.  The veins and arteries were reattached, and when the clamps were removed, the kidney became firm and red and began, following all appearances, to function perfectly.  For a brief moment, I even had the opportunity to hold a kidney in my gloved hands.

The hours flew by and, before I could blink, it was time for my afternoon physics class.  Engaged, I was reluctant to leave the surgery rotation.  However, while sitting through hours of physics equations may not be as exciting as watching an organ transplant, my experiences this morning infused an otherwise routine class with much greater significance.

Today is a day I will never forget:  for the first time, I caught a glimpse of the wonder and privilege of a profession that saves lives.

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