Wednesday at UZ Leuven

7:30 is the time the surgeon's co-assistant arrives at the hospital. I, luckily, was exempt from this reporting time, which would have required me to leave home at 5:00, I entered at 9:00 instead. Working hours are for healthcare staff are longer than those of most professions. Given, the work is varied and has a huge practical element, there is still the tedious yet necessary task of documenting consultations and inputting the data received from tests as I experienced. Today at lot of time was spent doing that. 

Upon talking to a medical student currently doing his placements I gathered that one of the perks of being a general practitioner is that your schedule is more stable and your work hours friendlier than those of hospital staff. On the down side, its pretty much a solitary job. I remember in the operating theatre, the surgeon found an abnormality in patients' liver. He was immediately able to send a sample of tissue to a pathologist for analysis as well as call a colleague for a second opinion.

I had another opportunity of visiting the laboratories and saw a cardiovascular experiment being carried out on a pig. I learnt that whenever blood samples were collected, the syringe was first rinsed with heparin which prevents the clotting of the blood and allows the easy analysis of the samples by the centrifuge.