A little preview

Today I spent the entire day in the OR, I figure this is a wonderful little preview of how my surgery rotation is gonna go, and man oh man do my feet hurt! 5 hrs standing, I even wore my most padded, comfy, old lady, easy spirit walking shoes and they still ache. Despite the ache in my feet and back I LOVED it today. This morning I watched the podiatrist debried a mid-tarsal amputation that developed a giant "hema-tomato". This is the 3rd surgery on this patients foot in 1month and I've got to say, I honestly think this guy has some kind of death wish. He's way beyond being "non-compliant" he's a nightmare to treat. He sneaks out of the hospital to go and get drunk, pulls out the drain and then walks close to a mile on his freshly amputated foot. Then when they put him in a room next to the nurses station to better monitor him, he unhinges his window and sneaks out again, so it's no surprise he ended up with osteomyelitis and a giant hematoma! It's hard to watch because he's really a nice guy, he's just an alcoholic and keeps making horrible decisions.

Anyway back to my day...

So I watched the pretty blood foot surgery, got to hold the debris bucket and work the suction tube. Then what was supposed to be a quick Lap Chole I was just going to observe became the highlight of my day! The other Doctor who was supposed to assist the general surgeon couldn't make it so I got to be the 1st assist!! I ran the endoscope camera and one of the grabbers holding up the liver and the fundus of the gall bladder. Unfortunately the super inflammed gall bladder was being tricky and we were having a hard time keeping ahold of it. The general surgeon decided it wasn't going to work laproscopicly so we went in Old School and did an Open Chole!! Giant almost 12" incision across the right side of the abdomen and I held the retractors and ran the suction, while he cut and cauterized the bleeders. The toughest part was standing for 3 1/2hours and pulling on the retractor for 1hr. My feet were killing me and my arms and hands got so tired. But getting to sick my entire hand in the patients abdomen was totally worth all the pain. After we finished he suture closed the facia layers and I stapled the entire incision and then a suture into the two smaller incisions where the ports were from the laproscopic attempt. Today rocked, can't wait for surgery to start in 12 days!!!!