Fun times at the hospital

I'm now finishing up my 2nd week of general/digestive surgery at Universidad Catolica hospital. While this is not a completely private hospital like I described before, it is pretty much just like being in America. We do basically the same things basically the same way. Mostly the types of surgeries are gall bladder removal (there are a freaking ton of these surgeries, and almost every one we take out is super advanced, scarred, with a million stones. They take out anyone's gallbladder who has symptoms or who is over 40 with asymptomatic stones to prevent chronic inflammation from leading to what is the #1 type of cancer here in Chile), hernia repair, and obesity surgery (either stomach stapling or stomach bypass). Almost everything is laparascopic (tiny incisions with cameras).

Every morning we do team rounds, and just like it would be at Mass General, this involves a super-rapid oral delivery of the patient's history and current status, full of abbreviations to save time. The first problem is understanding Chilean (yes this is different than Spanish) at turbo-speed. Also the abbreviations they use are initials derived from the Spanish name of the disease process, not the ones I've already learned at home. Sometimes the letters are the same but in different order since Spanish puts nouns followed by adjectives, such as CAT scan = TAC scan, but sometimes things are completely different. I've got a running cheat-sheet going so I can try to remember what they're talking about. Here's a sampling of my list, equally ridiculous in Spanish as in English:
AVE=CVA (stroke)
IAM=MI (heart attack)
TVP=DVT (blood clot in a vein)
CIA=ASD (a type of hole in the heart)
and so on...

Also hilarious are the surgical schedules. I'm sure for bureaucratic reasons they all have to include the diagnosis as well as the surgery that's planned to correct said diagnosis. Plastic surgery has some good diagnoses:
-Mammary hypoplasia (medical speak for under-growth), a serious disease for which the only cure is surely breast implants.
-Lipodystrophy of various areas, which obviously requires liposuction to prevent certain death.
-and nasal deformation requiring emergency rhinoplasty (nose job).

Next week I'm going to work at the public hospital see how that is. I'm guessing it will be a lot less like America.