Wednesday, August 8, 2007

New Assignment

I've been in the General Surgery Clinic for a month now (no more Dead End Corridor!). Life here is certainly different from life on the Multi-Service Unit. For one thing, I don't supervise any nurses and I have a capable and confident HM3 who manages the clinic itself and trains new corpsmen.

My main role here is to assist with endoscopic procedures through administration of intravenous conscious sedation (IVCS). I thought this would get boring, but I've been pretty interested in all the cases we've done so far (57 cases, if you include the 6 in which I was supervised to re-certify for IVCS and the 6 I supervised another nurse to get her IVCS-certified).

Today we saw worms.

Dr C got the willies. "I can't wash my hands enough after this," he declared. He kept muttering, "Wait till my friends see this on You-Tube." Then he'd shiver some more.