Power Outage at LAC-USC and New Student Interviews

Generators are a good thing especially in hospitals. This last week the eastern edge of Los Angeles experienced a power outage that lasted for a couple of hours and shut down the operating rooms at LAC-USC hospital. Well, shut down is not the exact word for it really; we were interrupted by the power outage.

It was a beautiful sunny morning in Los Angeles; the birds were singing and the hillsides never greener after all of the rain that we have received in the past several months. Surgery had been planned this morning for a young girl with a pelvic fracture that occurred during a motor vehicle accident a week ago. I had just induced general anesthesia and intubated this 17 year old girl when the lights in the operating room went out. She had been sitting in the back seat of a parked car several days before when a bus slammed into the side of the sitting car injuring all of the passengers. This sweet high school student and her family had been waiting for her pelvic fracture surgery for a couple of days now. She had an unstable pelvis and today the orthopedic surgical team was planning to stabilize her SI joint (sacroiliac) with pins. We were just about to turn her to the prone position when the lights went out.

The hospital generators kicked in immediately and all the power was restored to the operating room but we were now running on generator power. County generators are not the most stable of things. After a few minutes of waiting we got the news that one of the two generators supplying power to the hospital had failed and that we should abandon any surgery that had not started. I felt sorrow for my patient and her family that the surgery had to be cancelled. Actually it worked out ok for my patient. Her injuries were fairly severe and the repair of her unstable pelvis was going to be done in stages; now the entire repair was planned for this coming Saturday and was going to be done all at once. I had to now wake her up and recover her from a general anesthetic minus the surgery.

With nothing to do for the rest of the morning I hurried across the street to the student candidate interviews that were taking place today at USC Keck School of Medicine. The prospective students for next years class for nurse anesthetists were interviewing during this two day period and I had the chance now to go and greet the first group. This was my chance to let these prospective students know what they were in for if they were successful in their interview process and accepted into the program. Over the course of the next two days 45 or so applicants were interviewed by the educational committee. Several of the current students were able to spend several hours with the applicants, giving them tours of the campus and the general hospital. It was so interesting to see where I had been just a year ago. Now my classmates and I were on the other side of the interview process and identifying with the anxiety and the hope that I read on so many of the faces of the applicants.

The students and the candidates had a couple of hours to get to know one another outside of the interview arena. Here there wasn’t any pressure to perform and the candidates had lots of questions and stories of their own to tell. Many had come from long distances and were seeking their own dreams. I remembered what that was like. A year before I had traveled across the country interviewing at 4 out of state Universities, I had applied to 6 nurse anesthesia programs in all and had the chance to see what was out there across the country. What an experience that was.

Now looking back I can see that we have all come a long way even if there is still quite a way to go to complete this Nurse Anesthesia program in the Keck School of Medicine at USC. A year and a half more of clinical rotations and several didactic classes are still in front of us. Yet, now that I see these new candidates for the summer starting class it is obvious that we have made some progress. Damn if the lights did not go out again. At least its sunny outside and the hills are still green. It’s so nice in Los Angeles in the spring time.