Carcinoid Tumor Surgery: Nurses & Mayo Personnel

This is part of a handful of blogs I've written chronicling my experience in going through surgery to remove a carcinoid tumor from my right mainstem bronchial tube.
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I thought it'd be good to put together a small post about some of the staff here at the hospital. We've been quite impressed.

Of course Dr. Wigle is top notch and I've written about him before. We've had very limited time with him but I of course had a good 5 hours or so of time with him while I was unconscious and my chest cavity was wide open haha. Mayo is of course super well known not only in Minnesota but throughout the world for their quality healthcare and medical advances. It so clear that they do a ton of education. If fact, most of the staff attending to us has had at least one, sometimes more, students shadowing them. Even in the operating room, we're pretty sure a resident (student) had his hands in my chest doing some work. His name is John and he works on Dr. Wigle's team. I've seen him more than Wigle.

We have different nurses daily but we recall a couple that stood out. We had a nurse named Evan the second night I believe. We had three nurses one day and they were named Rebekah, Leah and Rachel! Leah was the head honcho and is quite experienced. Rachel was an RN who was still learning some things and she was good. and Rebekah looked like she was about 17 years old. We felt so bad for her one day she was trying to change my IV and she fumbled her equipment and dropped it. The nurse overseeing her said, "Oh, Bekah, that one's no good now." She blushed like crazy and felt really bad. We tried to ease her stress and joke with her about it later. It's funny to think back to know that Emily was once that young girl still in college following nurses around and super worried not really knowing what she was doing or if she was doing it right lol.

We got to know another guy really well on Wednesday but we forgot his name. He was really friendly and talkative. The entire staff have been very nice and welcoming and they do a good job. It does seem to take a little time to get orders approved because my nurse can't just make the decision whether to give me a medication or not. For instance, I wanted Benadryl one night to help with the itching that is a side affect of the epidural and so I could sleep better. The nurse can't make that decision, she has to put in an 'order' which goes to Dr. Wigle's team (probably goes to his Physician's Assistant) and they are the ones that have to approve it before they can give it to me. That was a little annoying at first but now we're used to it and we can plan in advance for all that. I'm not on heavy pain meds anyway so it hasn't really been that frustrating.

The respiratory therapist is a good guy as well and after talking with him for a while during therapy he actually reminds me of my father-in-law a little bit. He's been working on this floor of this hospital for 20 years and he opened the therapy unit here.