Blog Entry 22

Blog Entry 22: 10/22/08

In this post, I'll be going over my second day of Hospital Civil, which took place last week. I rotated through the operating room with Samantha. It was pretty fun.

I was able to watch my first orthopedic surgery, and I must say... IT WAS AWESOMEEEEEE!!!!!!

The patient was a male, who had an open fracture of the tibia as a result of trauma. The orthopedic surgeons were operating on his leg, 36 hours from the time the trauma took place. The patient wasn't fully anesthetized for the procedure, due to the fact that it was a regionalized procedure.
It started out with the anesthesiologist numbing the skin around the patient's L4 vertebra with litocane. Then he inserted a negative pressure injection/catheter through the muscle, into the spinal cord. If we saw the catheter fall out, it meant they weren't in the right area. The anesthesiologist inserted a thin needle to penetrate the spinal tissue (similar to a spinal tap). He drew out some spinal fluid, and put in the anesthesia. The process is a general process of anesthesia for most of the surgeries that I've seen.
After the patient was anesthetized, the orthopedic resident was using a needle to find the joint in the ankle. He inserted 2 screws, one in his tibia and one in his joint. At the end of the surgery there were 5 screws total around the ankle and in the tibia. They drilled the screws, above and below the fracture in order to line up the fractured areas of the tibia. They lined up the screws on both sides of the fracture, with other metal bits. The whole contraption was extremely rigid, and it managed to line up both parts of the fractured tibia, so that they would heal symmetrically. It was LITERALLY the coolest surgery I have ever seen!!!!!!!!!!!!
I loved this surgery because it was very technical. It was amazing that they used a simple power drill, to drill screws into the tibia. The procedure stimulated my mind spatially; in my head, I could see the different parts of the bone lining up when the screws were lined together. It's just amazing to me that we could fix the body using screws and power-drills. I've decided I want to be an orthopedic surgeon. Orthopedic surgery forces the surgeon to use their spatial intelligence, ingenuity and knowledge of the bones and leverage, in order to design different mechanical structures to fix fractures. It' extremely creative because every fracture is unique, and there are an infinite number of ways a fracture can act and look. It was a simple surgery, but I LOVED IT. I HAVE TO BE AN ORTHOPEDIC SURGEON!!!!!!!!!!!! If a kid breaks his arm playing football, I want to be the guy to fix it :).