Thursday, March 12, 2009

The Ides of Surgery...

Tomorrow will be the end of the 6th week of my Surgery rotation, the halfway point. Time sure does fly. All in all, it's been good. Sure, I am getting up at a wholly demonic hour, and feel like a very old man every night- but the rotation has been interesting.

Since last Monday, I have been on the Trauma team again and therefore did not have to take on-call shifts this week. That all ends this Monday. The trauma bay has been unusually slow this week and the traumas that came in were not incredibly serious. I did get to suture some poor soul's head laceration which bore a striking resemblance to a large Mercedes-Benz logo. (if it were drawn by a Parkinson's patient)

Just like on TV, the ER was incredibly busy and there was "no room at the inn;" so I got to do my Betsy Ross impression right there in the hallway. I did a pretty good job and was feeling pretty proud of my handiwork- the resident came over and looked at the now handsomely-closed wound gave it her blessing. Yup, I was feeling pret-ty proud of myself...until.

Since I was suturing him in the hallway I used a basin to catch the fluid I used to irrigate his wound with and when I was done instead of taking the extra minute to go discard the bin full-o-stuff, I set in down on the floor next to the counter. Of course everyone knows that: basins full of urine, feces, vomit, or bloody-saline and betadine have mystical magnetic properties! During my cleaning up- I was throwing out all the supplies I used; and right before I was finished- I kicked the basin over and splilled it ceremoniously all over the floor! Dumbass! Lesson learned.

Basin: 1 Ego: 0

2 Comments:

Rogue Medic said...

I did get to suture some poor soul's head laceration which bore a striking resemblance to a large Mercedes-Benz logo. (if it were drawn by a Parkinson's patient)

Was that the shape of the lac before your intervention or are you demonstrating a desire to imitate Picasso?

Will you be keeping a running tally of your ego vs the implement of destruction of the week? Kind of like a deficit clock. :-)

Vince said...

The lac looked like that before any stitching heroics on my part. Thank you very much.

And no, a running tally would be far to tedious this was a glimpse into one day's battle.

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