I have officially been grossed out!

Nothing really grosses me out. Blood, poo, puss...you name it, it won't gross me out. Oh wait, there is one thing: wound debridement. Now THAT grosses me out! Just watching it makes me think that it would qualify as some awful torture that the italian mafia would use. I'm on this new rotation, a surgical rotation with a wound care doc. The hospital I am at is the major burn referral center for the state, so we get lots and lots of burns. After a week, I figured out MOST (key word, most) burns are either self-inflicted, stupidity, and/or the result of being under the influence. It's been really busy...because of winter, I'm told. Anyway, last night the last surgery on the schedule was a burn debridement. I'd never seen one of those. Basically, the person is put to sleep and the surgeon slices off long pieces of burned skin with a crude looking tool that looks like a big cheese slicer. You keep slicing until you finally reach deep enough to bleed, which means you are now exposing live tissue (the goal). Anyway, I just couldn't quit cringing watching and listing to this "cheese slicer" cutting off long pieces of dead skin. "You wanna try it?", the surgeon asked me. I learned in medical school that you never say "no" when asked if you want to do a procedure, so I replied with an enthusiastic, "yes!". So there I was, 8 o'clock at night, sawing off long pieces of burned flesh, as if I was carving a Thanksgiving turkey, the whole time thinking to myself, "how on earth did I get here?...."