Surgery theatre 1&2 Tuesday Thursday

Surgery theatre days 1&2

The days in the operating room were pretty crazy. Tuesday started off eith setting and casting a broken arm. Overall a pretty quick procedure. The doctor called me over and told me to put my hands just below the shoulder. I thought he just wantd me to feel something but suddenly he told me to pull when he pulled. He pulled down the hand as I held to the shoulder. There were 2 loud pops as he then had me hold the arm in position as he put a cast on.

Next we watched a surgery on a young boy with a enlarged scrotum. A loop of intestine had broken though the weakened perennial wall and descended. It was pretty delicate and tedious. Very small cuts though single membranes, then a larger, held open, then another very small cut, repeated many many times. Eventually the intestine was found and pushed aback into place and everything sealed up.

The last one was pretty gross. A lady with a gangrenous hand sized sore on her butt cheek. After the skin was cut off there was a lot of vigorous scrubbing with a lot of water and a lot of mortified flesh cut away. It looked gross, smelled grosser and in the end there was no skin graft so she'll have to lay on her front for a long time, and will have problems with the bathroom for up to 6 months.

Thursday was pretty interesting as we'll with one really long procedure to start it off. There was a open fracture of the Tibula with a couple closed fractures of the Fib. For the most part the closed fractures were minor and ignored. At one point while two of the staff were preparing a new saline bottle for washing the wound out they had pouring the remaining bottle into the wound while they scrubbed and cleaned it. The direction wasn't very clear just a point and a shout and a bottle put in my hands. At first I was pouring small amounts periodically until it was made more clear they wanted a steady pour. I obliged until the saline bottle was empty and retreated back to my corner with the other 2 students. After the cleaning was done they started scraping away at the insides of the bone with a Metal instrument before pulling then setting the bones together. At that point they had to screw in 4 bolts 2 on each side of the fracture and then tighten them together. This took a very long time as the drill did not at all seem strong enough to get though the bone. Over and over the bolt would lock and the drill head would spin and the doctor would have to try again, trying to find the balance between enough power to get through the bond without causing the drill to skip.

There was a bullet lodged in a mans hand that the doctors tried to find and remove but they could not get to the bullet. They told us that it was either lodged enough into the bone they couldn't remove it or that it would eventually pass on its own.

The last surgery we watched that day involved a woman with a fatty growth tumor in her leg/thigh. This surgery lasted a couple hours because as thy doctor said there was no capsule to the fatty pustules so they just manually removed them. Hundreds of little fatty balls and a few larger pieces of flesh, 2 different incisions were made before they cleared out enough to satisfy. The worst part of that procedure was that the patient was constantly waking up from drugs And they pain releases kept wearing off quickly. The doctors complained that she was a drug addict and ignored it but the lady was moaning, screaming, and writhing pretty much throughout.