Surgery...

Yesterday, I woke up at 5:30 and drove to Skagit Valley Hospital and observe a surgery.  Dr. B let me go in and watch him do a C-section.  It was pretty amazing!  I learned more about human internal abdominal anatomy in 15 minutes than I had ever known before.  All the organized layers of tissue and the organs all neatly arranged.  I was surprised by how textbook everything looked.  Now, I was pretty sure I was going to feel at least a little bit queasy because I don't even like dissecting frogs or gutting a fish, but I found instead that, for some reason, I'm okay when it is living tissue being worked on.  The thing that did shock me that I didn't expect was actually seeing the baby.  I knew it was there, of course, but I wasn't "expecting" it.  One minute, the doctor is working on separating tissue and cauterizing blood vessels, and the next minute, there's a baby!  One of the nurses took the baby someplace else to clean him up and take care of him.  After that, they took out the placenta.  Look it up if you don't know what it looks like, because one side of it looks really cool.  The other side looks gross, though, so look for a picture with the side the umbilical cord is attached to, or you'll be wondering why I think it looks cool.  Lots of smoke from the cautery, a few stitches, and a bunch of staples (that was kinda weird too) to finish it off, and we were done.  The lady was awake the whole time, her vision obstructed by a sheet.  She had a spinal injection to numb her from the chest down, so on that side of the sheet, she could talk with the nurse and her husband and not have any idea that she has a huge hole in her stomach.  Very strange incongruity.