OR day 1

Wow...that's really all I can say about today. I woke up at 5 am after barely any sleep due to a wedding that lasted until 3 am. This week is wedding season due to some luck of the way everything aligns. There is a wedding that just started outside the window. The weddings are full of music, karaoke, and of course fireworks from 2-3 am. We left the hotel at 6:30 and arrived at the hospital with a warm meal. It may be 80 during the day but it is in the 40s at night with no heat. After breakfast we went to get started. I was originally supposed to be paired with a CRNA but am anesthesiologist dropped out at the last minute for medical rooms so I did my own cases without any assistance. It was overwhelming beyond believe. At first there was no oxygen, then no nitrous, and who knows how much anesthesia gas they were getting because we have to put sevo in a halothane vaporizer. I did actually see a bottle of it laying around. While everyone else was doing spinals I was doing general anesthesia with a gas machine I knew nothing about. It was beyond my comfort zone and a giant learning experience. I did ENT cases today. Removed 2 nasal polyps, fixed a hole in the side of someone's face and removed a giant blood vessel conglomeration called a hemangioma. After these cases I did an inguinal hernia repair with a spinal anesthetic and no sedation. The only monitors I had was a blood pressure cuff, a pulse oximeter, and my precordial earpiece, which allows you to listen to every breath. Everything was a challenger. I knew nothing about my patients, I didn't get to meet them before. I would take a patient to PACU and would come back and another patient would just be lying on the table waiting. While there were some hiccups along the way, everyone was alive at the end.