Last Day in Vellore

This may be my last post in a while, but I will try to keep it up next week, though I likely won't have as much time to be detailed, which is already difficult now. I'm glad you like the white text, as the overwhelming opinion seems to be. I will ask around, but so far no one has mentioned friends in Ecuador.

Today I was in surgery again, so I sat in on some more interesting surgeries. The first one was a biopsy (meaning you go into the body and get body part samples to test and discover a diagnosis for a problem- in my last post I used some medical terms on purpose as I did not think the general public would want to know the names the general public would use). They made small incursions and screwed in some tubes that they used to put cameras and knives down into the stomach, which was inflated. They used the camera to explore the abdominal cavity, so I was able to see the working liver, small intestine, large intestine and several other major features. It was very interesting, and the color was clear! They removed several samples. The second surgery was a thyroid removal, like mom had. They put her to sleep, then made a slit along the throat, and cut through the muscle. Then, they used strings to tie off a whole bunch of blood sources, and used a hot wire to burn through the organ to make a clean cut. I could smell the burning flesh whenever it turned on. The patient started to wake up half way through the surgery, and they had to quickly put her back under. Some of the blood sources were not tied completely, and a fountain of blood would spurt out, and one stream almost hit me, but I dodged out to the way. :) It was very interesting! Then, they sewed it back up (the muscle layer, then the skin layer on the inside, and then the outer layer, and the stitching was good, and after all that I saw, I think it will work out quite nicely for her. I got to close a tube, so felt like I was part of the surgery, and a med student got to help do one stitch on her, and it was his first ever and he needed a lot of help, and it was kind of exciting and I felt like I could understand him. He was one of the international students from Europe. We had to end our rotations early to make it to a thank you celebration we were throwing for CMC (Christian Medical College) to thank them for letting us stay. I helped Ardith (the teacher) buy cold drinks from the local markets, and we had to get like 10 big soda bottles, and we were something of a spectacle. We took an auto to the new school of nursing, and some other students brought a huge sheet cake, and it was rather nice. Sadly, we also had to turn in our CMC badges. Afterward, a bunch of people went to the fort.