That Sleepless Night

Okay, so I got tired of explaining to everyone what happened on 'the-best-sleepless-night-everrr!!' so I'm just gonna write it up here (probably also to refresh my demented brain sometime in the future).

So there I was, dawdling along in my room, absolutely unproductive at 11pm at night last Thursday (April 9th) when my pager beeped. Squealing with too much enthusiasm*, I snatched it up and proceeded to return the page. And voila! It was a page from the transplant coordinator at the Austin looking for a med student.

* With regards to my enthusiasm, no, I was not overly-hyped because I was paged (I was excited the first few times I was paged, but after the 10th one you just sorta go 'geezz, another one?' and sometimes you get the 'phantom pager syndrome' where you think it is ringing when it's not. And picture this scenario : Pager goes off in a room full of medical students + interns + residents + registrars. EVERYONE checks their pagers simultaneously, only to have one apologetic (or not) person walk out to return his/her page. Multiply this by 5 times in one hour. Annoying much??!)
Aaaanyways getting back on the topic, so I was excited because one other student have had this midnight page in the past so it was all systems go once the page arrived *

So to cut the long story short, she was looking for a Gen Surgery/GI student and unfortunately (for all of them, but fortunately for me YAY!) none of them paged back. She told me of the impending liver transplant scheduled at 8am the next morning, and told me I could rock up if I wanted to, and rang off. I sat there mulling over this piece of information, and wondered why didn't she say anything about the organ harvest. So dengan muka yang teramat tebal I rang back, and asked if there was going to be an organ harvest somewhere, and if I could go. She said yes! (lol sounds like I proposed).

Then started my (almost) midnight journey by train (it's surprising how many passengers Connex has at midnight! ) to the Austin to wait for the transplant harvest team. I couldn't stop yakking on the way: almost talked the ears off my housemates at home and called my mum and friend on the way to the hospital.

We flew by PRIVATE JET to another state from a private airfield (lol funny story the surgery registrar asked if my enthusiasm was due to the organ harvest itself or the private jet) but honestly speaking, the plane ride wasn't all that great. Seats were roomy, yes and with leather upholstery! Only 4-5 passengers plus the pilot and co-pilot who also doubled as air steward. It was an interesting experience, but not particularly enjoyable because somehow smaller planes make a whole lot more noise, and for some strange reason the floor under my legs heated up while we were many thousand miles above sea level. 1) Didn't do a lot for my confidence, and 2) freaking sauna on my legs does not feel comfortable!! Plus I always have difficulty sleeping on planes, hence my dislike of night flights.

2 hours later, we arrived and rushed to the hospital, changed immediately into scrubs and started on the operation. The deceased person (shall I call him/her DP) lay on the operating table, looking as if merely asleep. Many strange thoughts were running through my mind at that moment: Is he alive?Brain dead but not dead dead, would he be able to feel anything? Did he knew his organs were about to be harvested?

At that point the exhaustion (from lack of sleep + noisy plane ride + leg sauna) sort of took over my brain, giving me a detached outlook as if I was looking in from afar. I was slightly surprised at my detachment though, cos here we were cutting up and removing most of the major organs from a real live dead person and I was not in the slightest bit sqeamish. I caught a whiff of the odour from the body cavity; an interesting mix of blood and I dunno, body cavity juices? Wasn't particularly offensive till about more than 18 hours later when I was sitting in the cinema, the smell of popcorn wafted over and my nose just went !!!!!!!!! Exact same smell!!!!!! (lol maybe my olfactory nerves were playing tricks on me, but please, don't feel like you have to stop eating popcorn LOL).

Okay story getting too long, so what the surgeons did was to carefully dissect out the required organs and asked me a whole ton of anatomy questions out of which I answered ONE correctly (Ding! Surgeons =1, Omega =0 ). The coolest thing was that I was allowed to cut the heart out! Slash went my blade through the aorta + pulm vessels. Surgeon 1 joked " Your 15 minutes of fame! Who else did a cardioectomy the first time they scrubbed in??" and Sam's "You flew across the states to rip a guy's heart out!"

Sad bit: I left my beautiful bangle in the scrubs pocket! And forgot to take it with me when we left!! TT_TT bye bye bangle....

And we flew back to Melbourne, scrubbed in immediately for the liver transplant and I observed a bit before going off. By that stage I was zombie-like with no sleep for the past 30 hours, but the surgeons were still going strong ( they've had 2 other transplants that day, and have had no sleep other than cat-naps for almost 35 hours). Tried to sleep in the common room but nopes, brain was overworking so attended the rest of the day's classes and went home for a nice dinner out on Swanston and Aliens vs Monsters, 3D! (Super ex, but was a great movie :D:D)

:) So concludes my 40 hours without sleep. The day after, I slept til 6pm Hohoho.