Blog #7

 The last part of my senior project was spent at University Hospitals Landerbrook Health Center and University Hospitals Ahuja Medical Center. At UH’s Landerbrook Health Center, I spent time with another urogynecologist seeing patients. While some patients needed minor procedures, most of the patients were there to talk about past surgeries. After being in the operating room with patients under anesthesia for the majority of my project, I enjoyed learning about how doctors interact with their patients. The doctor that I observed always treated their patients with so much compassion, patience, and kindness, and they always knew personal details to strike up a non-medicine-based conversation. Through these interactions, I understood knowing a patient on a personal level makes them more comfortable and trust the doctor even when they are experiencing challenges with their health. Observing this doctor outside the operating room made me want to go into medicine even more because while surgery is fascinating, talking to patients through their struggles and triumphs is something I want to be a part of. Going to Ahuja, I got to see many of the same urogynecologist surgeries, but I also got to see a general surgeon operate. A tool I had not seen in the previous surgeries that I observed was the da Vinci Surgical Robot. The instruments used were similar to the laparoscopic surgery I observed in Geauga; however, instead of a surgeon holding the instruments, a robot was completing all of the movement. The general surgeon sat in a corner of the operating room looking at a screen with controllers to move the robot and complete the surgery. When talking with many of the nurses, they compared controlling the robot to a video game, which I thought was funny because it was a pretty high-stakes video game. The surgery was a hernia repair, and I learned to prevent the hernia from happening again, the surgeons use metal mesh to block the previously made hole the intestine went through. I really enjoyed having the opportunity to see a surgeon interact with their patients outside of the operating room because it taught me the skills of how to build a strong doctor-patient relationship, and I was amazed when observing the surgical robot because it shows the advances in technology from the laparoscopic surgery.




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