ORTHOPEDICS

ORTHOPEDICS
   “Bones break. Organs burst. Flesh tears. We can sew the flesh, repair the damage, and ease the pain. But when life breaks down, there’s no science, no hard of fast rules. We just have to feel our way through.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             -Meredith Grey

                They said that orthopedics was fun and easy rotation, but during our time, it was not.  We rotated in orthopedic last April, it was summer time so most of the people were in their vacations. We didn’t realize that many people were playing basketballs or different sports, or sometimes they were driving motorcycle, or climbing trees or rooftop to fix something and injury just happened.

                We were toxic during our duties in orthopedics. We always have more than 20 ER calls per days compare to previous months where more than 5 ER calls were considered toxic. We have many emergency OR, emergency admission, critical patients that were referred to us due to diabetic foot. We also have so many wound care that time. Some of them were just children below 5 years old and some of them were old.

                At first, I have no idea where to find the fractures in the x-ray because even a small fracture can be seen by orthopedic surgeon. I was amazed by their knowledge in reading x-rays of bones. That when I started to search on pictures of different x-rays and comparing it to the x-rays of my patients.

                We also learned how to manage each broken bones by putting a cast or splints. We were able to assist in different operations like ORIF, wound debridement, and placement of different screws. We were also able to know pain management of each patients.

                We were also participating in their endorsements, edema rounds, service rounds and grand rounds wherein our knowledge in orthopedics and anatomy were recalled. I don’t have so many pictures in orthopedics since it was a very toxic rotation for me compare to internal medicine. I realized that I didn’t want operating room and handling bones. It was really tiring rotation. However, the residents and consultants were very kind to us and always teaching us about the things that we don’t know during our rotations.