Working at Kids
I haven't written that much about work at all in the recent past at all - not that there are not interesting things happening, just that with the exams I haven't had the time.
I'm currently working at a paediatric institution in Sydney, and working nights again. Strangely, I don't mind nightshifts once I get into it - I'm hitting a certain degree of independence with kids now after 3 months here - I've had a couple of near misses early on (one case of laryngospasm, where a kid is half asleep/half awake and their vocal cords clamp shut and you can't intubate and can't ventilate them and their saturations drop from 100% down to 40%!). But generally, I think I can now manage fairly straightforward airways.
Being on nights you're the most experienced anaesthetics staff on site, and you are treated as such. It's nice to be back in the situation where I'm managing my own cases again without anyone looking over my shoulder and insisting I do it "their way". This is nice, and allows me to get a decent feel for how I would anaesthetise kids. Again, I like the people here, and get along very well with the nurses, which seems to be something that I'm good at doing very early on.
Probably the roughest part of the job is the shift called the "ward dog" which means you spend 12 hours during the day running around on the wards doing everything that they want you to. Usually this means just seeing patients and their parents preoperatively, and doing all the difficult cannulations on the wards. It's one thing to have a 40 year old that is a difficult cannulation, and it's another thing to have a 12 month old that is chubby, with tiny veins, and who kicks, screams, cries and generally won't cooperate with you at all. Sometimes I have to take a breather afterwards - it's that stressful.
But by and large it's good to be here for a little while. I will be heading back to Westmead in a couple of weeks, glad for having been looking after the little 'uns, but I don't know that I could become a Paediatric Anaesthetist, really. Dealing with the kids with severe congenital abnormalities (particularly cardiac and respiratory abnormalities) is pretty stressful. Sometimes trauma is a lot more fun (and interesting!).
I'm currently working at a paediatric institution in Sydney, and working nights again. Strangely, I don't mind nightshifts once I get into it - I'm hitting a certain degree of independence with kids now after 3 months here - I've had a couple of near misses early on (one case of laryngospasm, where a kid is half asleep/half awake and their vocal cords clamp shut and you can't intubate and can't ventilate them and their saturations drop from 100% down to 40%!). But generally, I think I can now manage fairly straightforward airways.
Being on nights you're the most experienced anaesthetics staff on site, and you are treated as such. It's nice to be back in the situation where I'm managing my own cases again without anyone looking over my shoulder and insisting I do it "their way". This is nice, and allows me to get a decent feel for how I would anaesthetise kids. Again, I like the people here, and get along very well with the nurses, which seems to be something that I'm good at doing very early on.
Probably the roughest part of the job is the shift called the "ward dog" which means you spend 12 hours during the day running around on the wards doing everything that they want you to. Usually this means just seeing patients and their parents preoperatively, and doing all the difficult cannulations on the wards. It's one thing to have a 40 year old that is a difficult cannulation, and it's another thing to have a 12 month old that is chubby, with tiny veins, and who kicks, screams, cries and generally won't cooperate with you at all. Sometimes I have to take a breather afterwards - it's that stressful.
But by and large it's good to be here for a little while. I will be heading back to Westmead in a couple of weeks, glad for having been looking after the little 'uns, but I don't know that I could become a Paediatric Anaesthetist, really. Dealing with the kids with severe congenital abnormalities (particularly cardiac and respiratory abnormalities) is pretty stressful. Sometimes trauma is a lot more fun (and interesting!).