Surgery Final Moments!

Surgery is CRAZY town. The hours are brutal (5am - 6pm x 5 days a week) but the experience is phenomenal. I have joined the mighty mighty blue team (general surgery) and the residents have been amazingly patient in teaching me all the pearls re: surgery. The army is pretty unique in that the surgeries and other services are entirely paid for... thus there have been quite a few gastric bypasses for overweight/unhappy spouses of military men as well as many MANY evaluations for essentially mastectomies for young, 20-something year old army men who feel they have "man boobs." Regardless of if I feel these surgeries are "medically necessary" they sure have been fun to scrub in on. I have had the incredible experience of touching almost every abdominal organ while it is still in a living person. Talk about an adrenaline rush. It's amazing to see them wake up a few hours later and think "yeah, I had my had entirely wrapped around your liver" or "I just ran my hands over >500 cm of your small intestine... no big deal..." AAHHH it's crazy. The best thing I've done so far is to suture small bowel to itself for a gastric bypass procedure. I'm pretty sure I peed my pants when the surgeon handed off the suture material and needle holder and told me I could create sutures INSIDE someone. Another highlight of this rotations was seeing an emergent c-section. The baby was in "frank breech" position meaning its feet were extended towards the uterus instead of its head as normally expected. This is a problem b/c babies are born head first... the solution is to manually (from the outside) try and turn the baby. This procedure is called an External Cephalic Eversion and it basically involves two doctors grabbing the baby at the head and feet respectively and attemping to rotate the baby in a clockwise position. It is successful around 60% of the time, allowing the mother to proceed with a normal vaginal delivery but if there is any indication that the baby is in distress the default is to perform an emergent C-section. Our attempt fell into the 40% fail rate thus one minute the room is calm and the next a type of controlled chaos takes over and the baby is pulled into this world within 3 minutes. That was pretty amazing to watch the birth of that healthy baby boy. Tomorrow is my final day of surgery and my last goal is to try and intubate someone prior to their procedure... stay tuned to see how it all goes down :)