Surgery Posting Recap (MMMC/ MUCM Student)

Average reading time : 6 mins 

Assalamualaikum and hi yalls,

So yeah, I successfully completed another posting Alhamdulillah. Oh and before I forgot, HAPPY NEW YEAR. since I think it's probably still January right. Life has been okay-okay so far, but I wasn’t as tired as I was before. So let's talk about my successfully completed posting. My second posting this time is Surgery. For this posting, we are not required to go to the hospital, except on Fridays, where we would need to go and visit the Orthopedics OPD.

Well to start, General Surgery is the branch of surgery that covers the main areas of surgical treatment. General surgeons treat diseases of the abdomen, breast, head and neck, blood vessels, and digestive tract. They also manage care of patients who have been injured or who have deformities or other conditions that need surgery.

Very bookish definition right? because I did copy and paste that definition from Google. tehee. 

But to define it in my terms, it is not what I thought it was. How naïve of me to think that Surgery department handles all the surgeries, and go to the Operation Theatre (OT) everyday. Surgery is such a broad area dummy (speaking to myself), but basically what we learned in this posting is whatever mentioned in the definition above; we studied hernias, breast diseases, male reproductive system diseases, varicose veins, arterial diseases and wounds. But the main thing that we need to learn (for every posting) is that we need to learn how to ask proper questions to the patient to get information on the disease. We need to get our core in history taking and shine it like a diamond. But doing history taking is basically like a police interrogating a crime suspect. But you're a doctor (an awkward med student) asking a real life patient.

Then we need to learn skills on how to observe and examined the diseased area of the patient, to confirm our suspicion on what disease the patient has. Again, I would say it’s very much like playing detective. 

As I mentioned before, for the surgery posting, we are not required to go to the hospital. All classes were held in our lecture hall, which took only 5 minutes from our hostel. We have two classes everyday (Monday to Saturday) except on Wednesday and Saturday where we only have morning classes. Luckilyy, we get to visit the hospital again, on Friday mornings where we would go to orthopedics OPD which I would be talking about later.

our seatings in the lecture hall

So for classes, for the first week, the lecturer himself will take all the classes, where he explains all about history taking and examinations of various diseases that we can see in Surgery department. After he finishes with all his topics, the next classes would be either a Case presentation or a SDL (self directed learning) class that is conducted by all of us students.

my art during my SDL presentation. horrible except for the legs which is kinda cute.

SDL- Self directed learning, is a session where the students will take over the class. We need to study the topics that we are assigned and teach the class. The lecturer will not be teaching the topics, so you need to present properly and also listen to other student's presentation thoroughly. The SDL presentations are done in the afternoon, but usually the lecturer would add up points if we have missed anything, but just think of it as if your tutoring your friends, so you won’t get too nervous.

I also forgot to mention that, we had the chance to go to the Clinical Skill Labs to practice the examination methods on various mannequins or human models. a

At first, the idea seems a bit bizarre that we need to fit in almost 20 students into the doctor’s OPD (out-patient department) room, but that’s exactly what we did. The room was definitely bigger than the OBG OPD room (where I talked about in my lost post here), but it was still, a room, and patient are constantly coming in and out to meet the doctor, while we are there, all of us are there. I can’t imagine how the patient would feel, having an entire class watching them, but we just need to suck it up and think of it as a learning process.

So what exactly do we do in here?

The doctor would normally show us different X-ray images and discuss a little about orthopedic surgeries and how it looks like in the X-ray. Our first class was extremely overwhelming, as I definitely did not refreshed my anatomy knowledge for awhile. He showes us some X-ray images and just tring to name the parts of the bones took me quite a while (with a help form Google of course). We also had the opportunity to look at a patient, who had undergone an amputation of the middle toe. Rough picture inserted below, and he had came for his weekly dressing of the wound. Then, we also saw a case of a little girl, who had a fracture on her elbow, and the doctor applied POP on her arm. It’s interesting, because the last time I’ve ever saw a POP was during my art class in secondary school, now it’s in the hospital. 💀