“We’re putting a retractor in which is holding the bladder down out of the way. This is the uterus here.”
Those were the words of Prof Fergal Malone, head of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI), as he delivered a baby by Caesarean section.
A roomful of 190 transition year students watched from Beaumont Hospital in Dublin as the surgery was broadcast via live video link from the Rotunda Hospital.
The new mother had agreed to be a part of the MiniMed School experience, a week-long programme for students from 90 schools across Ireland.
The interactive programme at the RCSI and Beaumont Hospital gives transition year students the opportunity to step out of the classroom and into the operating theatre to experience what a career in medicine is really like.
The course will cover a variety of topics, including forensic medicine, psychiatry and tropical medicine. Students will get to practice suturing on special synthetic devices, and they will watch a live laparoscopic surgery broadcast from Beaumont Hospital later this week.
Prof Arnold Hill is head of the School of Medicine at RCSI and an organiser of the programme.
Prof Hill promised practical training rather than “boring lectures”. This was their first broadcast of a birth. “We think this new innovation makes it even more exciting,” he said.
A few minutes after the video stream began, a screaming baby was on the screen. The students cheered.
“He’s adapting from the underwater environment to an air environment with a good scream. He looks very, very good,” Prof Malone said, before setting to the task of “putting everything back where we found it”.
After the surgery, students asked the surgeon questions ranging from: “What do you do with the placenta?,” to, “Have you ever had a baby named after you?” The answer to the latter was yes, but he tried to talk the parents out of it.
Sorcha O'Brien from Mount Anville Secondary School in Goatstown, Co Dublin, said she wants to be a surgeon after watching the birth.
“It was so cool and so amazing to be a part of the process of bringing a life into the world. It was really moving, and I wasn’t expecting that,” she said.
"It was very interesting seeing the different layers he went through to reach the womb, and having to avoid the gallbladder and things like that," said Páraic Cagney, a student at Belvedere College in Co Dublin.'
‘Pretty shocking’
Jack Doorly, also a student at Belvedere, found the surgery harder to watch.
“I thought it was pretty shocking. I was glad enough to have had a big breakfast beforehand. It kept my blood sugar up so as not to faint . . . especially the first cut and all the blood goes everywhere. I guess after that . . . it’s interesting, really. You kind of forget about the gore and you’re looking at all the different body parts,” he said.
“You’d be inspired by [the surgeons]. I thought the way he was doing his stitches and everything was really, really impressive.”