Micronesia Anesthesia Society

As of last night, Justin and I successfully completed the Micronesia Anesthesia Refresher Course that has taken place over the past week. Last night was the conference dinner during which laminated certificates were given to all the participants who completed the course and prizes were handed out to the person who performed the best on the daily quizzes. To our surprise, Justin and I were included in the recipients of said certificates. The fact that we've never taken the introduction - or "freshener" course as we like to say - was of no consequence.

As Justin mentioned in an earlier post, it was a very informative conference on many levels. My exposure to anesthesia is minimal at best, so I feel that I've actually learned something about the medications used, why these particular medications are selected, and what can happen in an OR that anesthesiologists need to be prepared for. The lectures were geared toward people with similar skill levels to mine despite the fact that they've already been working as anesthesiologists or nurse anesthetists (like Justin said, the retention level between conferences seems to be low). It was also an eye opener to the limitations that these people have to work with. Their training is inadequate, their drug supplies are abysmally low, and their facilities are disastrous. They don't perform nearly as many surgeries as more developed areas, and, thankfully, they easily recognize when they are over their heads and need to refer patients to places like Manila or Hawaii for better care (which they do without any second thoughts). They do the best they can with what they have, though, and I find that very admirable.

On the last day of the conference, the Aussie physicians organized a little game of Jeopardy as a fun way to end a long week. They picked an assortment of categories - some related to the topics they had been lecturing on all week and others completely unrelated. There were categories on history, geo-politics, and the history of anesthesia as well as more medically oriented ones. In an effort to let the others focus on the medicine they had just learned, Justin and I tended toward the history and geo-politics topics, especially the geo-politics category. I soon realized that I was going to be useless because every question had to do with either some obscure historical fact about Micronesia or it involved the military. Thankfully, the Aussie judges were very liberal with their hints (and their scoring) and all the other teams tried to help each other out as well. One of the questions had to do with the location of the US star wars program and all that came to mind was the skit in Edie Izzard's Dressed to Kill about the Death Star. I didn't think the Death Star was the right answer so I just stared at Justin until he made a guess (with a lot of help from the representatives from Yap). Needless to say, Justin and I had a strong finish in last place :)