no more blood, guts, bone and facemasks

Week one down, week 2: Instruments

My first week went fairly well. It wasn't super busy because of reading week...some doctors were on holidays and less surgeries booked because people in general went on holidays. I actually was hardly even in decontam most of the time. I was there the first day, and then every day after that I was there until my first break or lunch and then they were like ok just stay on the clean side, theres nothing to do here. But really if there's nothing to do in decontam, there's not a whole lot to do anywhere else either-everything comes through decontam. But thats alright, I was passed from person to person and shown different things here and there. There was some extremely dead times and so we had some good laughs about who knows what. Some of the people I am with are hilarious.



Anyways This week I am on the clean side in central processing in the instrumentation area. Here we get the instruments from the machines that come through decontam where I was last week. The instruments are put through the synergy machine for example, on the decontam side, and then it opens on the clean side when they are done the cycle.



So here I will be drying off and inspecting each instrument to make sure there is no visible crud left on them and making sure they are in proper condition. Then assemble the instrument sets according to what surgery it is for, and package them a certain way depending on the instrument set. After that they will be sterilized by whoever is in that area.



Sounds easy right? Well yes and no. It gets repetitive, but the hard part is remembering all the intruments and specific instructions for each one. There's a bajillion different instruments I will need to learn to recognize each and know how it needs to be in the set. Some are put on pegs or peg sets, some are rapped in a linen then put in the set, some are just placed in the tray, etc. And there are different sizes and versions of a lot of the scissors, forceps, and hemostats and such so its tricky to make sure you've got the right ones sometimes. But hopefully by the end of this week I will be pro at it!

Something I am good at: wrapping! I've been told by a few different people that I am so good at it and even better than them, who have been at it for years...so that was happy. I love wrapping stuff!