Daydream Believer

I haven’t gone crazy, this is the title of my Special Environments SSU.  The providers like to try and give them humorous headings to entice people to pick theirs over another.  This SSU gives me the opportunity to spend three weeks at the Day Case Surgery Unit in Torbay Hospital looking at anaesthetics and surgery.  We have three compulsory sessions and a feedback session each week, and apart from that we are given the listings for every other surgery going on in the unit and encouraged to see as much as we can.  I’m like a kid in a sweet shop, it’s amazing! Everywhere we go we are proudly told that Torbay has the best Day Case Unit in the country and the second best in the world, so it’s a great place to be.  We are also only allowed one student in each theatre, and there’s only three of us on this SSU so we all get to see what we want and are getting to be quite hands on too. 

I’ve spent time in pre-assessment, recovery, breast surgery, orthopaedics, maxillo-facial, GI, gynae, eye surgery, general surgery and urology.  I’ve retracted breast tissue, sutured feet, been chatted up by sleepy patients coming round from their generals, set up drips, helped remove a testicle, inserted my first successful cannula on a real person, managed airways, intubated and inserted LMA’s.  It is such a supportive atmosphere; it’s a really great SSU to be given.