Pediatric Cardiology – Day 18

Today I got to sit-in on an electrophysiology (EP) study. Besides me embarrassing myself by asking dumb anatomy question, it was a pretty cool experience. The whole process from the control room seemed like an old video game, or like they were operating a machine from the original Star Wars trilogy. A lot of beeps and geometric shapes and colors and lines, and everyone was saying things in essentially a completely different language. It was a bit overwhelming to be honest, because not only was I trying to process all the things there were to pay attention to in the control room, but then I also had to try to correlate it to what was actually going on with the patient in on the other side of the observation window. It was all pretty hard to follow the details, but I think I got a could birds-eye understanding of things. Despite my feeling of being lost, I enjoyed the challenge of trying to figure out what was happening, I can imagine it being even more exciting to actually know what was going on because they were constantly problem solving in real-time base on the physiologic feedback they were getting throughout the study. Pretty cool.