Skills Day

This week we had our yearly skills day. The highlight of skills day is airway familiarization, for me anyways. Our boss arranges to have multiple sets of pig lungs for us to practice on. We have the typical "fred the head" for run of the mill intubation practice and for King airway and for S.A.L.T. practice, but its hard to practice the surgical airway on Fred. Our medical director was present and dove right in with us. We practiced a needle crichothyrotomy and then surgical crichothyrotomy. We then ventilated the lungs. We were even fortunate enough for one pair of lungs to still have a large heart intact. Our medical director gently removed it and we passed it around, you could look right down the aorta and see and touch the aortic valve, we then disected th eheart, we could see and touch the chordae tendineae, and the bicuspid and trucuspid valves. It was an amazing experience and great refresher.  I will post some pictures of skills day soon...