Conant students view live heart surgery
About 250 Conant High School students planning on careers in health care watched a live broadcast of a heart surgery Wednesday in the auditorium of the Hoffman Estates school.
The aortic valve replacement took place at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, and the interactive video feed was arranged by Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry.
"The kids thought it was amazing," said Conant science teacher Erik Hauser, a former emergency medical technician himself. "It was very eye-opening."
Junior Cassidy Murphy said she enrolled in the school's Med Terms class because she's strongly considering a career in nursing. But she thought watching a heart surgery could prove the true test of whether she had what it takes to be in health care.
"We didn't do much preparing, so we didn't know what to expect," she said. "I was kind of nervous that it was going to turn me off of nursing. It didn't turn me off at all."
Cassidy and her classmates were impressed by the surgeon's ability to multi-task enough to answer their questions live. But they were slightly startled by the lack of preamble to the first incision.
"They're so used to it, they assume everyone is used to it," she said of the operating room staff.
About a month ago, the class went on a field trip to a university's gross anatomy lab where they were able to act like medical students by cutting into cadavers.
While she'd been even more nervous in advance about that visit, the beating heart and blood they saw on video this week turned out to be the more intense experience, Cassidy said.
Conant started the classes four years ago, Hauser said.