Surgery

My leg was fixed this past Wednesday in the best possible way. A tear in the meniscus was discovered, but it wasn't repairable so they just cut it out. So not only did my worry about having unneccessary surgery evaporate (diagnostic procedures are the worst!), I also got the result with the shortest recovery time. Pretty sweet, if you ask me.

For the past couple of days, I've been reliving the whole experience, trying to hang on to the few things I remember between the time my IV was put in to finally being discharged several hours later. This is the closest I've been to an OR since my last surgery in 2005, and not nearly as close as I was in high school when I got to observe a tumor removal from a man's pelvis.

Most of the experience is pretty fuzzy, understandably so, but the parts I do remember are pretty fascinating. It's like being able to shadow a surgeon from a very intimate perspective, and it's probably the most surgery shadowing I will get to see for another couple of years.

It's amazing how quickly the IV drugs kicked in, how nonchalant but efficient all the people in the OR were about getting me prepped for the procedure, and how professional and caring the nurses were when I finally woke up in post-op. It was also very interesting to see how a different hospital runs their outpatient surgery department as compared to the one I volunteer at every week. It's weird being on the receiving end of everything I tell people both as a volunteer and as an EMT on the ambulance company I worked at in college.

All in all, it's nice to be a patient and see what it's like for my future patients, so I can better understand what they will go through.

I sound like one of those pre-meds who gets excited about everything and anything medical they come in contact with, but seriously, this was pretty neat, mostly because I want exactly this to be my life and I just got a very intimate glimpse into what it may be like in the future, albeit from a very different perspective.

And I'm so stoked that it all turned out the way I had hoped it would. That's the best part!