New Externs and Labor and Delivery!

The program I am doing at UCSF has two new members starting this week! I've been here for two weeks (this is the start of my third week) with another girl from Tulane Medical School, and starting this week there are two more externs. They are both from Stanford, and have very likable personalities. One girl is originally from New Zealand and seems very considerate and sweet. The other girl is originally from Colombia and is bubbly and fun. The Colombian girl keeps telling us about her new IUD and how she's so excited about it. In case you are wondering, an IUD stands for intra-uterine device and is a form of contraception. People in family planning love the IUD; whenever anyone in the abortion clinic chooses this form of birth control, all the physicians get really emphatic and congratulate the patient on what a great choice they made. It actually is a really good form of birth control, because it has less hormones than other hormonal methods and does not require intervention on the patient's part, so misuse is minimal. But anyway, family planning people would marry the IUD if they could, and people glue IUD's to their name tags to show them off. The girl who started the externship at the same time as me, Lauren, also has an IUD. She often makes this very strange comment about IUDs. Whenever anyone mentions how awesome they are (which is daily), she mentions a patient who was about to go off to college and was on the pill, but decided to switch to the IUD because she wanted something more long-term and fail-safe for college. At this point in the story, Lauren always says, "I wish I had gone to college with an IUD. That would have been so great." It always makes me think she had birth control problems in college, and is about to tell a very personal story. It makes me super uncomfortable, haha. I normally like hearing people's stories about birth control, but Lauren is usually more formal, so her telling me something so personal just makes me feel weird. It'd be like Hilary Clinton talking about her birth control with me.

Today I went to Labor and Delivery, which was so cool! I actually didn't see any deliveries, but I saw lot of action in the operating room. One was a cervical cerclage, which is a stitch in the cervix to make it stronger. The patient kept miscarrying because her cervix is too weak, and was pregnant again so they put this stitch in her cervix to make sure the baby stays in as it should. They remove it when it gets close to delivery time. It actually looked extremely painful. She was numb from the waist down, but what gyne-surgeons do to cervixes makes me cringe. They sewed all around the cervix in a circle with thread that was as thick as a ribbon! Literally! I can't even imagine sewing a ribbon (1 cm thick) through my arm, let alone my cervix! Holy crap it looked painful!

The second procedure I saw was a woman getting her tubes tied! She had given birth in the morning, so her uterus was still really big and reached up to her belly button. Therefore, instead of making a visible incision, all they had to do was go in through her belly button to cut the tubes. It was actually quite ridiculous, they basically went fishing through her belly button. Ah! The physician just stuck her finger in through cut a hole in the patient's belly button and was reaching all around, looking for the tubes. She'd pull something out, stare and prod at it, and if it was wrong she'd just shove it back in and fish for something else!