Adventures in the OR

Today was possibly the best day of my life. Minus the tropical depression that is slamming St. Vincent at the moment, it has been a fantastic day. This afternoon I had my Orthopedic rotation. Everyone we had talked to who had been in surgical rotations said there were no surgeries in the afternoon. That was not the case for us. We waited outside the surgical ward and the doctor came to get us. He showed us immediately to the changing rooms to put on our scrubs. Once changed we were then directed into the Operating Theatre (no such thing as an operating room in the English world). As we walked in the Anesthesiologist was putting the patient under sedation. We watched the Orthopedic surgeon remove the pins out of the man's broken leg and then he put a cast on the leg. It was over and done in 30 minutes. I will admit that I was pretty scared during the procedure. I'd never been in an OR, and I had no clue what went on in one. As soon as we finished there the doctor told us to follow him to the next case. That's right, surgery #2 of the day!!! Dr. Woods gave us fair warning before we entered the next OR. We were doing an amputation of the distal half of a man's finger. He was a mental patient and had wrapped a rubber band around his finger and never removed it. Since it cut off circulation the finger developed gangrene and died. We walk in and the patient enters from the opposite door. He is wearing his hospital gown backwards and just flashing us...lovely. His finger is like nothing I have ever seen. I don't even know if I can put it into words, but it was awesome. Basically if you took the top half of a baby's finger and put it on top of an adult's...that's what it looked like. Dr. Woods tells us that for this procedure there will only be local anesthetic. WHAT!? We're cutting off a man's finger and not putting him to sleep?? The man watched the entire procedure. The finger and everything inside was so dead that it basically just fell off. The good doc asked , " Does anyone want it!?" to which our only response was our gaping mouths.
So those were my adventures in the OR...WHAT A DAY!! I'll let you be the judge of how we look decked out in our scrubs!! (If you can't tell I am cracking up behind my face mask)
~M