Cummings's Anatomy

I know you've all been dying to know: Is life as a surgical student as glamorous as that of a surgical intern on Grey's Anatomy???

Maybe you already knew the answer, but just in case, let's do a comparison.

The on-call room
Grey's Anatomy: The site of numerous romantic trysts between various medical house officers and attendings. Presumably kept clean. Presumably has comfortable beds. Presumably never used for sleep because everyone apparently goes home at 5 pm every day.

Real Life: The site of, at best, a few hours of sleep in the middle of the night when you've been awake for over 20 hours. A small twin bed with a plastic mattress like your old college dorm had, unmade since whoever the last person was on call slept there, with the flattest pillow in the world. A small bedside table holds a lamp, a cup of someone else's pocket flotsam (pens, etc), and an alarm clock that doesn't work. A small TV in the corner is there if you want it, but you don't have any extra energy or time to watch TV. Our medical student call room at the children's hospital is sandwiched between the men's locker room and the bathroom that is shared with the resident's call room. I can lock the door to the bathroom, but not the one to the men's locker room, so anyone in the locker room who knows the code can enter my call room. That makes for a very sound, secure sleep, let me tell you. And as for the romantic trysts, I wouldn't dare have one in that room even if money WAS involved. Not that money would normally sweeten any deal when it comes to such activities...

Sleep

Grey's Anatomy: The surgery interns apparently get a lot of sleep. I think this reflects poorly on the educational quality of the Seattle Grace training program, since it is quite obvious that the best learning opportunities are the ones that present themselves in the middle of the night when your brain and body are no longer functioning.

Real Life: Our interns are on call every 3rd night or so, meaning they show up at 4 am on Day 1 to round on the patients, stay through the day and night handling floor work and surgical cases (usually with no sleep), round again the next morning, take care of any loose ends, and leave around 9 or 10 am (hopefully) on Day 2. The rest of Day 2 is off ("post-call") and then on Day 3 they're back at 4 am and work until 6 pm or so if all goes well. On Day 4 the cycle starts over. We students have it slightly easier. I take call every 4th night, and hopefully sneak away around 1 or 2 am to catch a few precious hours of sleep in the aforementioned call room. We don't start until 5 am (A HUGE thank-you goes out to my awesome chief resident for not making us pre-round before the residents!), and on regular days leave around 5 pm.

I've actually adjusted disturbingly well to this schedule. I am now perfectly capable of falling asleep instantaneously whenever the opportunity arises, and functioning fairly well on very little sleep at all. For instance, last night I got 3.5 hours of sleep, woke up at 4:30 am, and ran on adrenaline, coffee, and Coke until 3:15 pm, when I hit the wall. For me, hitting the wall consists of feeling horrendously nauseous. I snuck away for a refreshing 45 minutes of sleep and have been going strong since, although as we speak the nausea has returned and my thighs feel like jello (sleep deprivation sign #2).

Cooking and Cleaning

Grey's Anatomy: Izzie appears to have ample time to bake on a regular basis. Granted, some of that baking was while she was taking a mental health vacation from her surgery training, but she bakes fairly regularly anyway. It appears that the interns bring homemade lunches to work on a fairly regular basis. Presumably, they cook dinner and eat real meals. The intern house looks well taken care of, clean and tidy.

Real Life: I am normally a frequent cooker. I like cooking; it's relaxing, and I enjoy trying out new recipes. Right now, though, I cannot even venture a guess as to the last time I cooked anything. There might have been a ramen noodle last week, but I'm not sure. Breakfast is found in the main physicians' lounge (fairly well stocked, actually: yogurt, cereal, bagels, muffins, donuts, fruit, coffee) or the surgery physicians' lounge (donuts, bagels, coffee). Lunch is often in the Norton's physicians' lounge (free, but tastes like your typical cafeteria food; as a poor, non-picky student who's only worked here for two weeks, I am not yet sick of it, but most of the residents are), or at McDonald's (conveniently located on the first floor of the childrens' hospital; public health be damned!). Dinner, if I must hang around for dinner, is usually ordered in: pizza, Chinese, Qdoba, etc. I'm not spending a ton of money, since a lot of it is free, so that is the only saving grace for my non-cooking lifestyle. Dinner, if I'm home for it, is usually either take-out or eat-out, since I have no energy to cook and we haven't gone grocery shopping for more than staples in forever. As for cleaning, since I mostly wear scrubs, I've stopped doing laundry. We had a pile of clean clothes occupying our lounge chair for nearly a week, and it would still be there if my mom hadn't come visit and folded everything; now I have a pile of folded clothes in a corner of my bedroom that I guarantee will sit there until October 12, when this rotation ends.

Surgery
Grey's Anatomy: All of Seattle Grace's cases are mind-blowingly amazing. Or at least, they don't seem to have very many mundane cases.

Real Life: Every day, there are at least 2 I&Ds (incision and drainages) of abscesses (think large, pus-filled pimple on a non-face part of the body), another 2 line placements, removals, or replacements (like central lines, catheters for chemo access, etc), and another two hernia repairs. It sucks to think these attendings have trained for so long just to be popping huge pimples. But it's great for me, because it's one of the few procedures I'm allowed to do -- and anyone who knows of my great love for popping regular pimples can certainly imagine how cathartic it is to stick a scalpel into a huge abscess and squeeze out all that nice, disgusting, white pus. MRSA: public health disaster, Holly's best friend she never knew about.

Grey's Anatomy: Did you know they scrub all wrong? They are always shown talking to each other while they scrub, but you can see their mouths moving (I tried to find a screenshot but couldn't; check it out yourself when the next season starts). Why can you see their mouths moving? Because they're not wearing face masks. Boo.

Real Life: In order to cross into the OR area, you must be wearing a head covering. You're probably familiar with the cool surgeons' caps I'm talking about:
Here is Dr. Richard Webber wearing a cool surgeon's cap. McDreamy presumably sports one under his neurosurgery loupes as well. You can see the OR nurse wearing an oh-so-stylish bouffant-style disposable head covering.

In this aspect, Grey's gets it right. The surgeons are always shown wearing their custom surgeon's caps. The female interns are usually shown wearing a similar style of cap (see Cristina above), although most of them probably actually have hair too long for such a cap; I'll have to watch more closely next season to be sure. Of course they wouldn't show glamorous Meredith in a lunch lady's cap, but that's what we all wear. Anyway, I was talking about face masks. To actually walk into an OR, you have to have your mouth covered. And you should probably have eye protection as well (you never know when pus is going to come flying at you!). But you have to put your mask on before you scrub, because once you've scrubbed, you're only sterile from your chest to your waist, and only in the front. You would not be able to tie a mask around your head once you've scrubbed your hands, so you have to put the mask on first.

That's it for this installment of TV vs Life. I've been writing this in bits and pieces over the last couple of weeks, but today I am post-call (I got an amazing 5 hours of sleep at the hospital last night, and another 3 this morning once I got home!) and plan to make the most of it. Anyone in the mood for... cleaning and studying?