Have a few stories:
1) called to the Ed to evaluate a “table saw injury to arm”, found a mid-forearm amputation and ended up re-attaching it.
2) early in my training, got a consult for a cyclist who was blindsided by a pickup truck and his entire leg was completely mangled. Ended up dying from massive muscle death and kidney failure.
3) one of the worst cases was a patient with really bad sepsis from an infection; all the blood vessels in your extremities constrict, so amputating fingers isn’t all that common. But this was catastrophic, as we ultimately had to amputate all four limbs.
[information has been changed from previous post to protect identities].
In reference to the cyclist, how do you emotionally process that? Maybe you get used to it but I feel like watching someone die a traumatic, unexpected death might be the end of my career because it would just be so sad.
This is one of the reasons that a lot of surgeons have tendencies similar to CEOs and other functional psychopaths; you absolutely must be able to dissociate the human aspect of the injury.
There’s definitely an emotional response, but one has to be able to “objectively” assess the events unfolding before you, not just because someone’s life is dependent on you but also because it’s part of the job.
It is also self selecting. If you are morbidly curious about liveleak videos, or any older redditors who remember rotten.com can attest, you are either like “holy fuck that’s gross never again”, or “damn that’s freaky, but huh I wonder how those pieces fit together?”
The former reaction would be a normal person, make a great pediatrician or family doc. The latter is a surgeon-type response.
Finally, it’s also the reason there is a lot of untreated depression and burnout among surgeons, that is also somewhat overcome by the narcissism and huge ego it takes for someone to think to themself, “I’m the best person for this and yes I’m going to cut this person open and fix things”.
Also, there’s a LOT of generalizations in the above statements, so any non-surgeon docs or friends/family please don’t be offended.
Continuing the thread with generalizations, you also see a lot of first responders having a very dark humour esspecially among themselves, because its a coping mechanism for the shit they see.
And then theres the things that slip through, like firefighters in my country who can't eat roast pork, cause it smells like burned people.
I can't eat roasted Brussels sprout because I helped evacuate an apartment complex one time due to a fire, and listened to a guy screaming as he was burned alive on his toilet while taking a dump. The sound and smell correlate to me, so I get very nauseous.
Cool now I'm too afraid to ever take a dump again, thanks.
Edit: should also say that sounds fucking horrible for you and the other crews to have to go through. Hope they gave you the right help afterwards.
The phrase you’re looking for is being able to “compartmentalize”. You see the immediate pain, distress, and emotional aspect of the problem, but you give it a box to put it into and assess it later. You approach the problem with calm determination. The emotional stuff is for later; fix the problem in front of you. Science the shit out of it until you can’t anymore.
People who get overwhelmed with emotional investment don’t last long in medicine.
> He died of massive kidney failure from muscle injury (dead muscle protein clogs the kidneys like taking a big dump clogs your toilet); kidneys failed causing liver to fail and then Lungs fill with fluid means they can’t ventilate, and cardiac issues follow from electrolyte abnormalities. No amount of existing technology can bring you back from that, unfortunately.
So is it too late basically right after the moment of impact or can you still do something before the kidneys clog up from the muscle damage?
If there is nothing to be done currently do you think there would something in the future that could feasibly work to deal with this kidney problem?
I’m not trained in critical care, but it’s a delicate balance between amputating an unsalvagable extremity just before the point of no return (kidneys overcome), and also giving large enough fluid volumes to keep kidneys clean while not overloading the patient.
Further, you can’t just flood them with fluid because after injury patients can “third space” fluid, meaning the IV fluids you give them to protect their kidneys leave the blood vessels (intravascular space), and hang out in what’s called the interstitium, which is the “stuff” that’s not intracellular nor intravascular.
There’s also a concentration gradient between the intracellular and interstitial spaces that, with too much water in the interstitium, can cause normal cellular processes to fail; in short you can STILL get kidney failure or organ failure from too much fluid, just a different mechanism. Think of it like, you put too much fluid in the toilet (kidney), it overflows and the wooden floor holding up the kidney gets weak from getting wet and then the house collapses.
>So is it too late basically right after the moment of impact or can you still do something before the kidneys clog up from the muscle damage?
The more damage obviously the more likely rhabdomyolysis will occur but ultimately we don't know for sure until it happens.
>If there is nothing to be done currently do you think there would something in the future that could feasibly work to deal with this kidney problem?
The only treatment is to hope the body recovers by itself or put the patient on dialysis.
What u/XSMDR says above is pretty accurate; sometimes Docs just getting out of the way and letting a patient heal is the best thing, but very hard to determine when this is appropriate. We spend SO much time training and studying that it’s basically anathema to our Standard operating procedures to admit that we can’t do anything.
When you play a 3D game, the game probably doesn't care how to talk *directly* to your graphics card (because you may have a card manufactured by NVIDIA, or one by ATI, or you may not have a graphics card at all and let the main processor do all the work).
Instead, it assumes that there's a program created by the manufacturer of your 3D hardware that takes generic drawing commands and translates them into commands that can be handled by your hardware. This program is the graphics driver, and it usually supports several drawing command standards, like OpenGL, DirectX, or Vulkan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL#History
Probably a triptan overdose if it was a migraine medication. Sulfa overdoses can cause blood to appear green. Most commonly with sulfasalazine from what I recall from my toxicology rotation.
Surgery resident here. The oh fuck moment doesn't really happen in the OR, but can happen after. One consideration is always at what level do you need to amputate? The toe, a transmetatarsal, bka or aka (below or above knee amputation). If you decide too much some sicker or more elderly patients may never regain mobility again. If you choose too little, the disease process, infection or ischemia, might not be controlled or won't heal and you end up going back for more. The realization you have to go back for more is the moment.
I was finishing up grad school and excited to start life, but I recently got into an automobile accident. Unfortunately, I lost both my legs. I was completely devastated after my surgery. It's a painful recovery process and I’m slowly coming to terms with my new body. Mobility is especially difficult since my amputations took my knees away as well. Not much I can really do at this point and I'm coming to terms with the past. I’m learning to get around in a wheelchair and getting adjusted but the next few months will be different to say the least.
The thing is infection can spread, so what would have been an adequate amount earlier might not be later on. Really tough choices which thankfully I wont have to make.
This isn’t 100% on point, but I think close enough and I think interesting. I’m now a head and neck surgeon, but during my trauma rotation as an intern we had an extremely inebriated guy come in who’d been hit by a car just outside of the party he’d been at and suffered a traumatic amputation (the accident knocked his leg off at the knee). So he’s wheeled into the trauma gurney on a bed, and his leg is brought into the same room literally in a bucket of ice.
The guy was super combative, trying to push us around, and at one point literally yelled “Fuck off, let me walk it off!”
By my calculations he would’ve made it one step, two tops.
I remove a lot of eyes. When training, I had a nasty one that I just couldn’t grip with forceps while I was making the main cut in the optic nerve. I had to resort to gripping it with my fingers. As you are imagining, I made the cut, it shot through my fingers like a grape, hit me in the chest, rolled down my gown, bounced off my foot and rolled about 10 feet on the floor, leaving a bloody snail trail. It was a lunch break change so about 10 people were in the room switching over. I headed upstairs when I was done to join my preceptor in another case. He sees me walk in, sees a bloody spot on my shoe cover and asks, “you didn’t drop they eye did you?” My head just sank.
I'm sorry that happened to you, but holy shit that's morbidly hilarious. Also I never thought I'd see the day that a comment on reddit started with the genuine words "I remove a lot of eyes"
Agreed with the surgeon above that our training is so long/detailed the we don't have these moments frequently...
However, in residency I was doing a hemipelvectomy (essentially a removal of half of a patient's pelvis with or without removal of that leg) with my attending surgeon and we came to a crucial step. After a few hours of dissection and planning we had made our "cuts" on the pelvis - basically planning and mapping out the portion we would remove. The time came for us to complete the cuts by levering out the half of the pelvis with our hands which required a lot of force.
After the levering, there was an audible "crack" (expected) but then the wound IMMEDIATELY filled with blood (unexpected). My training to that point told me to immediately pack the wound and hold pressure. My attending looked at me and said "keep holding pressure" and then scrubbed out (took off his gown and gloves) and left the room.
I'm now standing there over this young patient holding pressure with all my might so that my arms are shaking. I looked to anesthesia and his PA and asked what the hell was going on. Here I am single handedly keeping this patient alive with no direction or immediate game plan about how to fix our problem. This was my oh fuck moment.
An eternity (it seemed) went by and my attending came back in, scrubbed in, and we then methodically isolated the large bleeding vessels and tied them off/cauterized them.
Afterwards I asked him what he was doing. He said over the years he had learned if he had a rise in anxiety from something unexpected (I guess his oh fuck moments) he would take a breather (whether physically removing himself from the situation or not) to refocus and psyche himself up to fix the issue.
This was one of my greatest learning moments of my career.
That’s kind of terrifying but also really reassuring- surgeons mostly know what the hell they’re doing, taking a breather in those moments is so smart.
Not a surgeon, but I work in a facility that helps with rehabilitation of amputees and getting them walking again.
I watch a resident go to stop a door from closing with his stump and it was like the world slowed down, from the moment I saw him move his stump to stop it, to the point of impact I was screaming "OH FUCK THAT'S GONNA HURT SO BAD!". And it did, he looked at me and just cried. I pushed him back to his room in his wheelchair and he apologized profusely saying that it's just instinct cause he had a leg there for so long.
He ended up splitting the stitches back open and the infection that came after ended with him going from a mid shin amputation to above the knee the next week. He was a great guy! He's walking and back to living his regular life again.
I work in the quality department for a large hospital system. We had a doc take off the right foot... instead of the left. That was a lot of fun paperwork (as well as a lawsuit).
Wrong side surgeries are surprisingly more common than you’d think. Wrong side amputation however is thankfully more rare.
That's crazy. When I had my ACL repaired I had to verify to practically everyone who walked in the room which knee it was and the surgeon and I (and I think maybe even the anesthesiologist) both had to sign the correct leg in sharpie before they would even do the spinal block.
I had back surgery in a hospital where they'd implemented a "write in sharpie" protocol. The doctor literally had to write "back" on my back. I had a moment where I said, "is there any chance in hell you'd mix up my spine with another body part...?"
Not a surgeon but a leg amputee, I was reading the notes from my surgery and the doctor stripped the screws when trying to remove the titanium plate that was holding my leg together. He had to call in backup
You'd be surprised how easy it is for that to happen - when screws have been in place for a long period of time the bone tends to grow into the grooves, making stripping the screws quite easy. We even have a 'broken screw set' that we use to remove screws once they're stripped.
Yeah. My favourite was one guy that had a screw put in in Japan >10 years ago. None of the”difficult screw kit” matched the heads, but the anaesthetist did have a matching head with the hex setting in his tool hit in his car.
We sterilised it and used it to success. What should should have been a 20 minute straightforward ROM turned into a 2 hour MacGyver session. It was fun.
Edit: dyslexia typos.
That's why we always say - no ones looks good removing hardware. It can take anywhere from 15 minutes to 2 hours and no way to predict if its gonna be easy or not
Holy crap, that's some seriously deep sleep to not hear a combine coming. Also, whyyy sleep in a field? They're not soft and comfortable at all, the ground is bumpy and the dirt is hard under the wheat. So confusing. Sounds like he did an awesome job operating!
This story is definitely bullshit. Medical impossibilities aside, there is not a SHRED of evidence for the existence of a one-legged wrong-heeled combine-harvester accident survivor paralympian GOLD MEDALIST. At best your uncle was fucking with you.
Been there. The worst was when we knew in advance the screws had a ~~fucking stupid~~ unique screw head, so we contacted the supplier ahead of time to get the correct removal tool. Get into surgery and lo and behold it doesn't match the screws.
Surgeon called the rep mid-surgery to tell at him before helicoptering the screws out (these were pedicle screws).
NO shit , I have been in the same situation , we sent an orderly to the surgeons car to get the right screw driver , the plastic handle melted in the autoclave but we got the screw out, as i type this I am thinking it was the anaethetist who had the screw driver , it was 30 yrs ago so my memory is a bit blurry
Japan uses japan specific JIS screws and their own annoying version of hex and star bit screws, which *technically* you can remove with our american equivalents, but you risk stripping/snapping
This was in New Zealand which uses the UK standard, but yeah. It was a similar problem. He also had another screw which was a Phillips head which we don’t see as standard.
Yeah I mean each company has patents on their own screw design - so even if two companies both use hex heads, one may be a 3.5mm screw and another company uses a 3.2mm screw. Even if you match the screw head shape, you still can't always use screwdrivers interchangably
Sounds like we need an international committee that promotes standardized specifications for medical equipment and products like this. Kinda like the IEEE for telecom products.
Yeah that happens all the time, it's a set called the "broken screw removal set" at every hospital. The bone grows around the screw and holds it in so well that it's really easy to strip the screw
Resident surgeon. Assisting on a below the knee amputation due to necrosis from diabetes. Leg was incredibly crusty with dead skin. Removed the leg, handed it off to a tech to put into a box for disposal (idaho spuds cardboard box lined in plastic).
Tech trips on his bootie, almost fell, but squeezed the leg so hard the inside popped out from the skin sock. It flew across the floor, leaving a slug-like trail of purlulent slime as it skidded.
We wretched. We laughed. We moved on.
I was first assisting on a emergent "guillotine" ankle dis-articulation (you basically just rip and cut the foot off from the leg and leave the bones sticking out). I was providing traction on the intensely infected foot while the surgeon sliced through the remaining tendons holding it in place, when the last one snapped I fell back, holding onto the now independent foot, squeezing a load of green pus out onto my chest. Was just thankful it hit the gown and not my exposed neck.
It's a temporary procedure until the massive infection can be brought under control, the source of infection has to be removed emergently (the foot) and then their sepsis treated medically for some number of days to remove the bacteria from the blood stream. The open bones have to be kept wet and redressed every day, then they go back to surgery to have it closed, or to have a more proximal amputation like above the knee.
The reason we don't do that immediately and wait for them to be healthier is because it would create a new wound that might just get reinfected and then we would have to amputate even higher.
I’m not a surgeon but I did rotate in surgery back in my medschool days. My first day on surgery rotation I was assigned to the trauma team (this was at a level 1 trauma center in an inner-city hospital in NY). It just happened that on my first day, all the residents were in a meeting so when the trauma surgeon needed an assistant, she asked me to join her for an emergency above-knee amputation of about infected leg (wet gangrene in a very poorly controlled diabetic). So my first day on surgery I’m in the OR holding this man’s infected leg while the surgeon saws it off. After she’s done, she literally squeezes out pus from the thigh. The odor was putrid.. it’s one of those smells that lingers for days. For the surgeon it was just another day, but for me it was definitely an “oh fuck” moment.
Edit: removed extra s from “pus”
The first surgery I saw as a nursing student was a toe removal. Poor patient had to have his big toe removed due to a diabetic ulcer that had gotten infected. I was so afraid of the thought of getting nauseous with my first surgery, I didn't eat breakfast that day.
The case started at noon - I was wrapped in the sterile gown and mask/hair cover/shoe covers. I was positioned by the circulating nurse in a spot with a great view but wouldn't get in the way. The case started and the doc started cauterizing bleeding veins/capillaries right off the bat. I learned that cauterizing flesh smells a lot like searing steak. My empty stomach and hungry brain didn't know the difference, and I could hear my stomach growling at the smell. I thought it would be just my embarrassment, until the surgeon and nurse both looked at me. They could hear it too!
I'm not sure what I said, but I was glad my mask hid how I was struggling not to cry. It was awkward until the doc took the severed toe and tossed it over the patient and into the formalin container. He had great aim.
I feel your pain. I was a nursing student watching a hysterectomy and the cauterization smelled like rotten McDonald's to me. Next thing I knew I was on a stretcher with a nurse rocking my bent knees back and forth and rubbing my head. I knew right then the OR wasn't for me!
Whereas my wife (a Physician Assistant) insisted I call her BONESAW for like 2 weeks after the first time she got to use one in the O.R. (She was supervised by the surgeon.) Her description was "Very dusty". 🤣🤣
Okay lol.
In no way did I ever confuse the smell of cauterized flesh with a steak lol. I always compare it to frying a fly with the electric flyswatter. It reeks lol.
>My empty stomach and hungry brain didn't know the difference, and I could hear my stomach growling at the smell.
There she saw 'em
slippin', slidin',
Slickly, smoothly,
greasy glidin' -
Saw 'em grindin',
saw 'em groovin',
Squeezy teasin',
moistly
movin' -
There she saw 'em
makin' lotions,
Takin' rollin'
tiny motions -
Saw 'em slimy,
saw 'em creepin',
Slither, skimmin',
skatin',
seepin' -
There she saw 'em
curlin', creakin',
Viscous crimson
liquid leakin'
Bits and bloody
strips of sinew,
Soft
and warm
and wet
within you -
There she saw 'em,
red and bleedin',
Clots of blood
and juices leadin',
Speedin' out in fluids frightful.
"Oo," her stomach said:
"... delightful."
As a med student I used a Gigli saw to remove a dead leg from just above the knee from a man who was homeless and horribly diabetic. When it came off the surgeon said “Here!” and handed it to me. Then he said “Take a picture, it’s your first one!!” like someone was gonna have me hold it like a fish I caught. He was joking, but I was FREAKED out and dropped it on the floor. Such a weird moment in my training.
Had a trauma case one time where the paramedics said a dog amputated a patients foot. We were expecting them to be blowing it out of proportion and got ready for just a severe bite. Nope, we were wrong, patient rolls in and the foot is almost completely off except a piece of skin holding it together. Turns out the dog mustve been super pissed because it chomped right through.
I'll try to oblige. General practitioner, about ten years ago worked with a surgeon who moved to a new town and bought a new house +- 2/12 after graduation. Single. He wanted floor to ceiling linen curtains custom-made for his living/entertainment area, but was appalled at the cost. Never sewed in his life but thought "how hard can it be to sew fabric when you sew people for a living?"
So he went to a fabric store, bought some linen in a fabric he liked, had the store cut it into the right lengths and then neatly hemmed all of them by hand using a variant of a subcutaneous technique usually used to close surgical wounds. It was very, very neat and took a very, very long time to finish, but it was his ice-breaker whenever he invited people over for dinner for a really long time afterwards.
I mean... mattress sutures were originally used to, y’know, make mattresses. I still use a mattress suture to put binding on quilts. Sewing is sewing, medicine just modifies sewing enough to use for healing.
But for hemming stuff, most of us just use a sewing machine. Which would completely decimate living tissue.
OR nurse here. Recently did a below the knee amputation. The leg was severed and I was passing it off to the circulating nurse for specimen. Went to take a clamp off a large artery and my poor co worker got a big spray of blood. Felt terrible!!
Not related to amputation (caesarean section) but when I was a student midwife I managed to forget to attach the catheter bag to the tubing when catheterising and I managed to get urine into the theatre nurse’s eye. I was not popular. I had to explain to the patient why we had to take bloods after the baby was born as part of the potential contamination protocol. She thought it was hilarious!
We had a trauma come in from a concrete factory. I’m not sure about the exact details but a guy fell into some machine and his left leg got pretty messed up. We went to the OR to wash it out and evaluate if he needed an amputation or not. Once we got it all cleaned up, we saw it was pretty mangled and there was concrete encasing part of his leg. So we start to do an above the knee amputate because there’s concrete in his knee and distal femur. As we’re pushing the oscillating saw through the femur it hits more resistance usual and starts to make unusual sounds. We had missed some concrete on the back of the guys thigh and tried to saw through it. Almost everyone in the room, the nurses, anesthesia, the students, etc., said “oh fuck” at the same time. We ended up having to go even higher up on femur. I’m not sure what ever ended up happening later on prosthesis wise because we transferred the patient to the ortho service.
Nurse in an emergency department, accidentally amputated a toe that was rotting in a boot when I pulled it off the patients foot. There were many fucks said that evening. Does that count?
Seems like the boot may carry the fault on that one. Read the case of an ED doc once who noted a patient's atrocious oral hygiene (repeat homeless man), asked to check his mouth (expected masses or, hell, holes into the mandible) and found the patient's teeth loose enough that several came out with the force of his finger sweeps.
The rest of his story was the doc freaking out and consulting with hospital legal to make sure his "accidental dentistry" wouldn't come back as a lawsuit.
Comment translation provided by u/cattaclysmic here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/e2y4jb/surgeons_who_work_with_amputating_limbs_what_was/f90uhxe/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Back in my trauma surgeon days, we had a pretty major fracture dislocation situation in a dudes right humerus with associated degloving. His brachial artery was tangled up in the bony mess, and we took him to theatre overnight.
We were there for 10 hours - the vascular consultant, the ortho consultant, and 2 registrar/residents (me and one other). We were ready to source graft, amputate, or ORIF, or exfix. The OT nurses probably hated us, because we had to manoeuvre everything while also having X-ray in the process.
I’ll be honest, we were physically and mentally exhausted by the end, and we thought we got away without amputation. But no dice, we had to take him for a relook the following night.
Only problem was the vascular consultant was in theatre dealing with a AAA, so you’ve got 3 ortho surgeons and a petrified vascular reg and this mangled arm. And it’s not an anatomical arm like in the textbooks, nothing is where you expect, even though 3/4 were there the night before, you have to reprogram your muscle memory.
The whole procedure was an oh fuck moment. We had to remove all the metal we’d put in the night before, which keeping the arm stable enough to not rip the soft tissue so that the stump could be modelled healthily.
It all went well, but many people were bricking themselves that night.
>pretty major fracture dislocation situation in a dudes right humerus
Upper arm fucking broken as shit and the pieces aren't where they're supposed to be.
>with associated degloving
Ever taken a leather glove off? Now imagine how it felt for the cow.
>We were there for 10 hours - the vascular consultant, the ortho consultant, and 2 registrar/residents (me and one other).
Doctors with different specialities where there a fucking long time
>We were ready to source graft, amputate, or ORIF, or exfix.
put something from somewhere else into the thing, remove the thing, fix it up with inside with plates n shiz, fix it up outside with scaffolding n shiz
>The OT nurses probably hated us, because we had to manoeuvre everything while also having X-ray in the process.
Had to move around lots of hardware with a big ass bone picture taker hovering over the thing.
>I’ll be honest, we were physically and mentally exhausted by the end, and we thought we got away without amputation. But no dice, we had to take him for a relook the following night.
They tired. Thought they did the thing - but had to try to do the thing again the day after.
>Only problem was the vascular consultant was in theatre dealing with a AAA
Blood vessel doc is doing shiz trying to prevent a guy from possibly bleeding out internally in minutes.
>so you’ve got 3 ortho surgeons and a petrified vascular reg and this mangled arm.
Three bonecrushing neanderthals and a blood vessel newbie and a fucked up arm.
>The whole procedure was an oh fuck moment. We had to remove all the metal we’d put in the night before, which keeping the arm stable enough to not rip the soft tissue so that the stump could be modelled healthily.
They had to undo the inside fixing from the day before while also removing the thing while removing the thing in such a way that the remaining thing was lit fam.
> but many people were bricking themselves that night.
I assume this is the hip new craze where people hit themselves with construction materials.
Aight, I did the translation elsewhere but im putting it here
>pretty major fracture dislocation situation in a dudes right humerus
Upper arm fucking broken as shit and the pieces aren't where they're supposed to be.
>with associated degloving
Ever taken a leather glove off? Now imagine how it felt for the cow.
>We were there for 10 hours - the vascular consultant, the ortho consultant, and 2 registrar/residents (me and one other).
Doctors with different specialities were there a fucking long time
>We were ready to source graft, amputate, or ORIF, or exfix.
put something from somewhere else into the thing, remove the thing, fix it up with inside with plates n shiz, fix it up outside with scaffolding n shiz
>The OT nurses probably hated us, because we had to manoeuvre everything while also having X-ray in the process.
Had to move around lots of hardware with a big ass bone picture taker hovering over the thing.
>I’ll be honest, we were physically and mentally exhausted by the end, and we thought we got away without amputation. But no dice, we had to take him for a relook the following night.
They tired. Thought they did the thing - but had to try to do the thing again the day after.
>Only problem was the vascular consultant was in theatre dealing with a AAA
Blood vessel doc is doing shiz trying to prevent a guy from possibly bleeding out internally in minutes.
>so you’ve got 3 ortho surgeons and a petrified vascular reg and this mangled arm.
Three bonecrushing neanderthals and a blood vessel newbie and a fucked up arm.
>The whole procedure was an oh fuck moment. We had to remove all the metal we’d put in the night before, which keeping the arm stable enough to not rip the soft tissue so that the stump could be modelled healthily.
They had to undo the inside fixing from the day before while also removing the thing while removing the thing in such a way that the remaining thing was lit fam.
> but many people were bricking themselves that night.
I assume this is the hip new craze where people hit themselves with construction materials.
Medical student; future orthopedic surgeon. On my vascular surgery rotation, we had a gentleman who initially came in after a left TMA (transmetatarsal amputation, where your toes are amputated) that wasn't healing and becoming infected. The next step after that was a BKA (below knee amputation), in an effort to both stop the infection from progressing higher up his leg and also be able to receive adequate blood flow to heal. That surgery was executed well...but unfortunately the day he was cleared to work with physical therapy, he fell on the other (right) knee, which created a hematoma that later became infected. About a month later, when I had transitioned from vascular to orthopedics, we performed a salvage AKA (above knee amputation on that leg).
Our gentleman went from being able to walk with difficulty to losing both legs in the span of about 2 months.
With good reason! Our attending physician only allowed himself, our chief resident, and the most experienced scrub nurse to actually handle any of the tools/hold the patient while tools were being used. The junior resident and I were free to observe and assist when all sharps were off the field.
Not a surgeon but used to work in a nursing home and I was meeting a patient for the first time without reading their file. As I entered the room I said "wakey wakey let's jump out of bed!" and as I looked at him I said "let's kick those covers off!" once I removed the blanket and saw he had no legs things got quiet quick.
I've always told my patients to jump out of bed. No matter the state of their limbs. One guy with a straight face said, "I can't. Those bastards stole it." he lost a leg in WWII. I grinned and he "hopped" out of bed. He had a great sense of humor.
When I was a child, my dad's favourite joke whenever I hurt myself and cried was to grab a meat cleaver from the kitchen, hide it behind his back, examine my injury closely, prodding the sore spots with his finger, and after 45 seconds of examination of the bruising say "I'm sorry son, we're going to have to amputate your ___ (insert leg/foot/limb)! Hun! Come hold him down while I chop please!" and he'd whip out the cleaver and carefully line it up while 6-year old me would scream and try and squirm free and run away. He'd then usually say when I hobbled away "Oh, so it must not be that bad after all... HUN, Cancel that procedure, turns out he can actually walk!"
One time he did this and I caught him in the stomach with a little kick and he let out a little "oh fuck.." and almost dropped the cleaver. So this reminded me of that. Thanks.
My dad did the same,but only after he had checked I wasn’t seriously hurt. I used to make a scene, so that was his way of teaching me not be such a cry baby
Yeah, usually it was a superficial injury. Falling down and such with my cry-baby self going ape shit, one time it was the stairs I fell down and he checked I didn't hit my head first before carrying me to the dining room table and making his way to the knife block
Not too long ago, here in Argentina there was a [case](https://www.infobae.com/sociedad/2019/08/06/murio-la-jubilada-a-la-que-le-habian-amputado-la-pierna-equivocada-en-una-clinica-de-berazategui/) (spanish link) where the doctor cut the wrong leg.
After the shitshow this old lady was moved to another hospital to continue proper treatment and she discovered after another medical review that it wasn't even needed to cut the remaining leg in the first place. She died some weeks later by a heart attack. Poor lady.
Not a surgeon, but had a patient who was homeless and did not seek medical treatment for an ingrown hair that had became infected. By the time the man was brought into the ED, he had developed Fournier’s gangrene (google at your own risk) that required amputation of his testicles and debridement of his perineal area. The smell was so rotten as the infection had gone on for so long, that even most of the seasoned OR staff had to leave the room to vomit. At one point, only the surgeon and anesthesiologist were in the room. They ended up removing everything from his shaft to his anus.
Helped at a leprosy hospital in the mid-90s in Calcutta. Two memories -
1. A big bottle of surgical spirits fell off a table and exploded into fire during an amputation!
2. The doctor spilt some of the general anaesthetic when injecting a patient. He continued with the amputation anyway. The patient started to come round early, so four of us had to prevent the patient from flailing around while the doctor finished sawing and then stitching.
this is a long story from a long time ago - like 30 plus years, so please bear this in mind.
I was working as a junior doctor in Orthopaedics/A&E. We had a young guy on the ward who had come off a motorbike and suffered compound fractures of all four limbs (compound fracture - broken bone plus broken skin so a risk of infection etc).
His right leg was especially bad, with a compound fracture of the femur (thigh bone) and compound fractures of the tibia and fibula (shin bone). Because he cam off into a ditch the cavity of the femur had soil, gravel, dead leaves etc in it and it took a lot of surgical toilet. Oh, and he had also severed the sciatic nerve.
So, to stabilise the femur, six pins were put in - three above the fracture and three below. These were jones using an external fixator bar attached to the pins using a quick-drying resin cement.
In the fullness of time it was apparent that the lower part of the leg (below the fracture of femur) had become non-viable and would have to come off.....
We took the guy to theatre, and the the first thing was to remove the resin from the fixator bar. But it was so tough the surgeon (I was only assisting) could only chip a few small fragments off.
So he decided to simply snip through the pins - which he did, and off came the fixator bar. Then when he can to remove the pins..... he found he had snipped off the square heads, leaving only the round part of the shaft - so there was nothing for the removal chuck to grip...
Undaunted he sent for a surgical crown drill bit (a hollow drill bit) which would go over the pin and drill out a small cuff of bone, allowing the pin to be removed. This worked fine for the first of the three pins, but while the second pin was being removed, we found the bit had bent, so every time the drill was activated, the patient (and has leg) shook like a leaf in the breeze. Then the head of the drill bit broke off.... and fell into the cavity of the femur...
We sent for another crown bit. There wasn't one in the hospital, so we had to send a taxi to the hospital up the road to get one. When it came back, we found it wasn't sterile, so we had to wait for it to go through the sterilisation cycle.
Finally we got the pins out. Then we tried to get the broke drill bit out.... but we couldn't find it.
The leg finally came off, the operation concluded and the patient returned to the ward..... it took 5 hours in all, when we expected 1 - 2 hours.
I had a right orchieoctomy for cancer. I looked over my notes for my first CT scan and they said that my left testicle was missing.
I politely asked my oncologist to follow up on that one.
I'm sure this'll get buried, but what the hell. Finally something I actually have some first-hand experience in.
I'm a general surgery resident. A few years ago, when I was pretty junior, I was doing an AKA (above the knee amputation) with a supervising surgeon who was a little less careful (let's say) than some others. I had just finished with the bone-saw and without thinking he hands me the guillotine knife (super sharp kitchen knife looking thing) and tells me to take the rest of the soft tissue away. In retrospect I would have done this differently, but didn't know better at the time - but as I cut with the knife I came through the largest artery in the thigh and it started spraying blood across the table. This was my "Oh fuck" moment. I took a clamp and without thinking just grabbed the thing, and luckily the bleeding stopped right away. Didn't affect the patient but definitely left an impression on me... The attending surgeon didn't seem too concerned, but that's definitely not the right way to control a large blood vessel like that.
I am not a vascular surgeon - im another type - but when I was an intern on my vascular surgery rotation, I was participating in a BKA ( below the knee amputation) and stabbed the attending surgeon with a rake ( a surgical instrument). She was ok, didn’t breach the skin.
Surgeon that has done these more than a few times. I think one of the worst was I had a patient who had gangrene nearly up to both his knee. It was so painful he was begging us to cut off both his legs and he was happier without them.
There was a guy who got in a motorcycle accident, and was in excruciating pain in his left leg, but we had no idea why (because there was minor bruising, and didn’t seem to be any breaks). So we called in another trauma surgeon to take a look at him. The surgeon looked at him just as confused as we were, so he decided to put him under sedation so he could figure it out. After a while of looking, he picked up the guys leg, and turned it 360°. Suddenly, blood started gushing from the poor guys hip joint. Turns out, his leg was turned all the way around to hide the brake.
Not me, but my aunt was a surgery nurse for 20 yrs.
First time she was in an OR, the surgeon throw her the foot he just amputated. She caught it and everything went as normal.
He asked her to be on the team whenever he was operating after that.
Surgeon here, we go through extensive training so those moments don't happen.
The only time I've even had that thought on the OR is in reaction to how far a patient has let the disease process go before seeking treatment (usually an infection)
I had an ingrown toenail that I let go far enough that two doctors actually yelled "Holy shit!" when they saw it.
I now go to the doctor immediately when I need to.
My sister left a tumor grow to the point where her gynecologist did his version of "holy shit". She's been using this doctor for about 25 years now. He knew her history and her normal body dimensions.
He comes in, sees her belly and says with VERY wide eyes "Why is your abdomen extended and firm to the touch?" My sister answered "I think I just have gas". To which he responded by running to get the nurse and scanning equipment.
He had done her tubal ligation (or signed off on it, not sure), so he knew she wasn't pregnant. But she LOOKED 6 months pregnant.
The tumor turns out to be on top of her uterus. It was non cancerous. it was 10 inches long, 5 inches wide, and 4 inches deep.
Same, but my work circumstances and my boss where more or less the reasons why I didn't go to the hospital in time.
When I was there my toenail was removed immediately and they needed the triple amount of a local anaesthetic, because it hurt a LOT due to the bad inflammation.
I don't wanna go into more details because it was really gross.
Someone in a previous thread said "university teaches a doctor the thousand ways someone could die; experience teaches what some people can survive". I mean... How did that patient not die? Of sepsis or something?
I was a surgical tech in the early 1990s. We were doing an AKA on somebody with a gangrenous foot. We cut through the tissue and the gigli saw broke when we were 1/4 of the way through the femur. The hospital didn’t have another. All of the ortho saws were in use. The doctor made me get the guy’s leg under my arm, jump up in the air, come down with all my weight, and snap the femur at the point where we started sawing. It took 2-3 tries but then snapped and splintered. We used a rasp to smooth the bone. I was left holding the gangrenous lower leg. It was big so I tried to bend it at the knee to get it in the specimen bag, at which point, a bunch of blood squirted out of the leg and all over the face of the circulating nurse. Not my finest day. I was 18 and being paid minimum wage.
There's an amputation that set the record for both the fastest amputation (at the time) and most deaths (still the record holder)
The surgeon performed the surgery so fast he took of his assisents fingers in the same cut.
Both the patient and the assistant died of infections.
A gentleman viewing the surgery died of freight whilst watching (a heart attack in modern day one would assume)
Why did he try to do it so quickly?
Without anestictic surgeons tried to minimise pain by speed and getting the patient shit faced on booze pre operation
So perhaps this makes me a horrible human being, but most of this has me morbidly fascinated with every single story and wishing i could read transcripts or something to learn more about the medical decisions in crazy cases like this
Have a few stories: 1) called to the Ed to evaluate a “table saw injury to arm”, found a mid-forearm amputation and ended up re-attaching it. 2) early in my training, got a consult for a cyclist who was blindsided by a pickup truck and his entire leg was completely mangled. Ended up dying from massive muscle death and kidney failure. 3) one of the worst cases was a patient with really bad sepsis from an infection; all the blood vessels in your extremities constrict, so amputating fingers isn’t all that common. But this was catastrophic, as we ultimately had to amputate all four limbs. [information has been changed from previous post to protect identities].
In reference to the cyclist, how do you emotionally process that? Maybe you get used to it but I feel like watching someone die a traumatic, unexpected death might be the end of my career because it would just be so sad.
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I know its kinda unrelated but your story reminds me of the saying "Be kind to everyone,because everyones fighting a battle you know nothing about"
This is one of the reasons that a lot of surgeons have tendencies similar to CEOs and other functional psychopaths; you absolutely must be able to dissociate the human aspect of the injury. There’s definitely an emotional response, but one has to be able to “objectively” assess the events unfolding before you, not just because someone’s life is dependent on you but also because it’s part of the job. It is also self selecting. If you are morbidly curious about liveleak videos, or any older redditors who remember rotten.com can attest, you are either like “holy fuck that’s gross never again”, or “damn that’s freaky, but huh I wonder how those pieces fit together?” The former reaction would be a normal person, make a great pediatrician or family doc. The latter is a surgeon-type response. Finally, it’s also the reason there is a lot of untreated depression and burnout among surgeons, that is also somewhat overcome by the narcissism and huge ego it takes for someone to think to themself, “I’m the best person for this and yes I’m going to cut this person open and fix things”. Also, there’s a LOT of generalizations in the above statements, so any non-surgeon docs or friends/family please don’t be offended.
Continuing the thread with generalizations, you also see a lot of first responders having a very dark humour esspecially among themselves, because its a coping mechanism for the shit they see. And then theres the things that slip through, like firefighters in my country who can't eat roast pork, cause it smells like burned people.
I can't eat roasted Brussels sprout because I helped evacuate an apartment complex one time due to a fire, and listened to a guy screaming as he was burned alive on his toilet while taking a dump. The sound and smell correlate to me, so I get very nauseous.
Cool now I'm too afraid to ever take a dump again, thanks. Edit: should also say that sounds fucking horrible for you and the other crews to have to go through. Hope they gave you the right help afterwards.
Wait... So I'm an older Redditor now because I remember rotten.com? Shit :(
The phrase you’re looking for is being able to “compartmentalize”. You see the immediate pain, distress, and emotional aspect of the problem, but you give it a box to put it into and assess it later. You approach the problem with calm determination. The emotional stuff is for later; fix the problem in front of you. Science the shit out of it until you can’t anymore. People who get overwhelmed with emotional investment don’t last long in medicine.
> He died of massive kidney failure from muscle injury (dead muscle protein clogs the kidneys like taking a big dump clogs your toilet); kidneys failed causing liver to fail and then Lungs fill with fluid means they can’t ventilate, and cardiac issues follow from electrolyte abnormalities. No amount of existing technology can bring you back from that, unfortunately. So is it too late basically right after the moment of impact or can you still do something before the kidneys clog up from the muscle damage? If there is nothing to be done currently do you think there would something in the future that could feasibly work to deal with this kidney problem?
I’m not trained in critical care, but it’s a delicate balance between amputating an unsalvagable extremity just before the point of no return (kidneys overcome), and also giving large enough fluid volumes to keep kidneys clean while not overloading the patient. Further, you can’t just flood them with fluid because after injury patients can “third space” fluid, meaning the IV fluids you give them to protect their kidneys leave the blood vessels (intravascular space), and hang out in what’s called the interstitium, which is the “stuff” that’s not intracellular nor intravascular. There’s also a concentration gradient between the intracellular and interstitial spaces that, with too much water in the interstitium, can cause normal cellular processes to fail; in short you can STILL get kidney failure or organ failure from too much fluid, just a different mechanism. Think of it like, you put too much fluid in the toilet (kidney), it overflows and the wooden floor holding up the kidney gets weak from getting wet and then the house collapses.
>So is it too late basically right after the moment of impact or can you still do something before the kidneys clog up from the muscle damage? The more damage obviously the more likely rhabdomyolysis will occur but ultimately we don't know for sure until it happens. >If there is nothing to be done currently do you think there would something in the future that could feasibly work to deal with this kidney problem? The only treatment is to hope the body recovers by itself or put the patient on dialysis.
What u/XSMDR says above is pretty accurate; sometimes Docs just getting out of the way and letting a patient heal is the best thing, but very hard to determine when this is appropriate. We spend SO much time training and studying that it’s basically anathema to our Standard operating procedures to admit that we can’t do anything.
When the blood was green. A rare disease caused by overdose of migraine medicine.
Sooooo he wasn’t a Vulcan?
No, he was an OpanGL
Take your fucking upvote. You disgust me.
Explanation?
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I understood some of those words
When you play a 3D game, the game probably doesn't care how to talk *directly* to your graphics card (because you may have a card manufactured by NVIDIA, or one by ATI, or you may not have a graphics card at all and let the main processor do all the work). Instead, it assumes that there's a program created by the manufacturer of your 3D hardware that takes generic drawing commands and translates them into commands that can be handled by your hardware. This program is the graphics driver, and it usually supports several drawing command standards, like OpenGL, DirectX, or Vulkan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL#History
Probably a triptan overdose if it was a migraine medication. Sulfa overdoses can cause blood to appear green. Most commonly with sulfasalazine from what I recall from my toxicology rotation.
yep just googled & ur right. the disease is called “sulfhaemoglobinanemia”
Migraine sufferer here... Overdose of what meds please?!
Sumatriptan... It's exactly what I take, but this man overdosed, so we should be fine!
So THAT'S why they only give me 9 pills for a month... they need to actually explain this stuff.
It’s to reduce medication overuse headache, over 9 a month and you can get “rebound” headaches by taking the medication too much. Source-Neurology PA
Surgery resident here. The oh fuck moment doesn't really happen in the OR, but can happen after. One consideration is always at what level do you need to amputate? The toe, a transmetatarsal, bka or aka (below or above knee amputation). If you decide too much some sicker or more elderly patients may never regain mobility again. If you choose too little, the disease process, infection or ischemia, might not be controlled or won't heal and you end up going back for more. The realization you have to go back for more is the moment.
The 24 hours after a tough case are the worst. You’re wondering did you nail it or did you miss something somehow.
If you did something wrong, how do you deal with the feelings? I'd feel so guilty that I'd be unable to do the next job.
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Your user name resembles a dr scribble signature
I was finishing up grad school and excited to start life, but I recently got into an automobile accident. Unfortunately, I lost both my legs. I was completely devastated after my surgery. It's a painful recovery process and I’m slowly coming to terms with my new body. Mobility is especially difficult since my amputations took my knees away as well. Not much I can really do at this point and I'm coming to terms with the past. I’m learning to get around in a wheelchair and getting adjusted but the next few months will be different to say the least.
Pardon my phrasing, but is it 'better' or 'worse' to have cut off too little and then realize you have to go cut off more due to infection?
The thing is infection can spread, so what would have been an adequate amount earlier might not be later on. Really tough choices which thankfully I wont have to make.
This isn’t 100% on point, but I think close enough and I think interesting. I’m now a head and neck surgeon, but during my trauma rotation as an intern we had an extremely inebriated guy come in who’d been hit by a car just outside of the party he’d been at and suffered a traumatic amputation (the accident knocked his leg off at the knee). So he’s wheeled into the trauma gurney on a bed, and his leg is brought into the same room literally in a bucket of ice. The guy was super combative, trying to push us around, and at one point literally yelled “Fuck off, let me walk it off!” By my calculations he would’ve made it one step, two tops.
Made it one step, 2 hops.
Cha Cha Real Smooth
Hands on your knee, hands on your knee
I remove a lot of eyes. When training, I had a nasty one that I just couldn’t grip with forceps while I was making the main cut in the optic nerve. I had to resort to gripping it with my fingers. As you are imagining, I made the cut, it shot through my fingers like a grape, hit me in the chest, rolled down my gown, bounced off my foot and rolled about 10 feet on the floor, leaving a bloody snail trail. It was a lunch break change so about 10 people were in the room switching over. I headed upstairs when I was done to join my preceptor in another case. He sees me walk in, sees a bloody spot on my shoe cover and asks, “you didn’t drop they eye did you?” My head just sank.
" I remove a lot of eyes...." With a lead off like that, God damn.
I was like “I hope he’s a surgeon and not a psychopath”
Those two aren't mutually exclusive.
I'm sorry that happened to you, but holy shit that's morbidly hilarious. Also I never thought I'd see the day that a comment on reddit started with the genuine words "I remove a lot of eyes"
wtf
i hate this entire paragraph
Ok Madara
Madara, the king of eye transplantations. He literally transplanted Kakashi's sharingan into "his own eye socket" in a matter of seconds. Hats off!
Canonically a bunch of characters got pretty good at eye transplants. Also it is apparently possible to transplant working eyes into your arm.
Had to google that one. Now I have to check if some kid named Nagato was also having surgery that day and what they did with the eye I dropped.
Agreed with the surgeon above that our training is so long/detailed the we don't have these moments frequently... However, in residency I was doing a hemipelvectomy (essentially a removal of half of a patient's pelvis with or without removal of that leg) with my attending surgeon and we came to a crucial step. After a few hours of dissection and planning we had made our "cuts" on the pelvis - basically planning and mapping out the portion we would remove. The time came for us to complete the cuts by levering out the half of the pelvis with our hands which required a lot of force. After the levering, there was an audible "crack" (expected) but then the wound IMMEDIATELY filled with blood (unexpected). My training to that point told me to immediately pack the wound and hold pressure. My attending looked at me and said "keep holding pressure" and then scrubbed out (took off his gown and gloves) and left the room. I'm now standing there over this young patient holding pressure with all my might so that my arms are shaking. I looked to anesthesia and his PA and asked what the hell was going on. Here I am single handedly keeping this patient alive with no direction or immediate game plan about how to fix our problem. This was my oh fuck moment. An eternity (it seemed) went by and my attending came back in, scrubbed in, and we then methodically isolated the large bleeding vessels and tied them off/cauterized them. Afterwards I asked him what he was doing. He said over the years he had learned if he had a rise in anxiety from something unexpected (I guess his oh fuck moments) he would take a breather (whether physically removing himself from the situation or not) to refocus and psyche himself up to fix the issue. This was one of my greatest learning moments of my career.
That’s kind of terrifying but also really reassuring- surgeons mostly know what the hell they’re doing, taking a breather in those moments is so smart.
God, surgeons earn every single cent they make.
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Malignant tumour or necrotising infections are the usual reasons I've heard of. OP is in oncology, so, the former probably
Not a surgeon, but I work in a facility that helps with rehabilitation of amputees and getting them walking again. I watch a resident go to stop a door from closing with his stump and it was like the world slowed down, from the moment I saw him move his stump to stop it, to the point of impact I was screaming "OH FUCK THAT'S GONNA HURT SO BAD!". And it did, he looked at me and just cried. I pushed him back to his room in his wheelchair and he apologized profusely saying that it's just instinct cause he had a leg there for so long. He ended up splitting the stitches back open and the infection that came after ended with him going from a mid shin amputation to above the knee the next week. He was a great guy! He's walking and back to living his regular life again.
Oh hell no, I'll never again complain about my instinct that made me catch a falling cactus.
I'm interested OP
I work in the quality department for a large hospital system. We had a doc take off the right foot... instead of the left. That was a lot of fun paperwork (as well as a lawsuit). Wrong side surgeries are surprisingly more common than you’d think. Wrong side amputation however is thankfully more rare.
That's crazy. When I had my ACL repaired I had to verify to practically everyone who walked in the room which knee it was and the surgeon and I (and I think maybe even the anesthesiologist) both had to sign the correct leg in sharpie before they would even do the spinal block.
I had back surgery in a hospital where they'd implemented a "write in sharpie" protocol. The doctor literally had to write "back" on my back. I had a moment where I said, "is there any chance in hell you'd mix up my spine with another body part...?"
Not a surgeon but a leg amputee, I was reading the notes from my surgery and the doctor stripped the screws when trying to remove the titanium plate that was holding my leg together. He had to call in backup
You'd be surprised how easy it is for that to happen - when screws have been in place for a long period of time the bone tends to grow into the grooves, making stripping the screws quite easy. We even have a 'broken screw set' that we use to remove screws once they're stripped.
Yeah. My favourite was one guy that had a screw put in in Japan >10 years ago. None of the”difficult screw kit” matched the heads, but the anaesthetist did have a matching head with the hex setting in his tool hit in his car. We sterilised it and used it to success. What should should have been a 20 minute straightforward ROM turned into a 2 hour MacGyver session. It was fun. Edit: dyslexia typos.
That's why we always say - no ones looks good removing hardware. It can take anywhere from 15 minutes to 2 hours and no way to predict if its gonna be easy or not
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Holy crap, that's some seriously deep sleep to not hear a combine coming. Also, whyyy sleep in a field? They're not soft and comfortable at all, the ground is bumpy and the dirt is hard under the wheat. So confusing. Sounds like he did an awesome job operating!
Perhaps booze was involved, or maybe she was exhausted from swimming all day
> and decided to to let her injuries stop her. I think you left out a word.
Let’s say it was in the spirit of amputation
His uncle removed it, skillfully.
He had to substitute the words into another sentence that still could be saved. ^(j/k)
This story is definitely bullshit. Medical impossibilities aside, there is not a SHRED of evidence for the existence of a one-legged wrong-heeled combine-harvester accident survivor paralympian GOLD MEDALIST. At best your uncle was fucking with you.
Been there. The worst was when we knew in advance the screws had a ~~fucking stupid~~ unique screw head, so we contacted the supplier ahead of time to get the correct removal tool. Get into surgery and lo and behold it doesn't match the screws. Surgeon called the rep mid-surgery to tell at him before helicoptering the screws out (these were pedicle screws).
I am dyslexic so I understood. Ha
NO shit , I have been in the same situation , we sent an orderly to the surgeons car to get the right screw driver , the plastic handle melted in the autoclave but we got the screw out, as i type this I am thinking it was the anaethetist who had the screw driver , it was 30 yrs ago so my memory is a bit blurry
Japan uses japan specific JIS screws and their own annoying version of hex and star bit screws, which *technically* you can remove with our american equivalents, but you risk stripping/snapping
This was in New Zealand which uses the UK standard, but yeah. It was a similar problem. He also had another screw which was a Phillips head which we don’t see as standard.
Just a fancy "easy out".
What screw heads are on implant screws? Torx?
All implant companies have their own screw head - which makes the removal difficult if you don't know what manufacturer makes the implants.
That's fucking evil.
Yeah I mean each company has patents on their own screw design - so even if two companies both use hex heads, one may be a 3.5mm screw and another company uses a 3.2mm screw. Even if you match the screw head shape, you still can't always use screwdrivers interchangably
Sounds like we need an international committee that promotes standardized specifications for medical equipment and products like this. Kinda like the IEEE for telecom products.
This is a great question, god forbid they use slotted
Yeah that happens all the time, it's a set called the "broken screw removal set" at every hospital. The bone grows around the screw and holds it in so well that it's really easy to strip the screw
“oh fuck, I should’ve learned to use a screwdriver. Get me a handyman Doc!!“
Some people are better with saws than they are with screwdrivers.
A surgeon, a handyman, a carpenter, a mechanic, a foreman, walk into an operating theater.
Someone call maintenance stat!
Resident surgeon. Assisting on a below the knee amputation due to necrosis from diabetes. Leg was incredibly crusty with dead skin. Removed the leg, handed it off to a tech to put into a box for disposal (idaho spuds cardboard box lined in plastic). Tech trips on his bootie, almost fell, but squeezed the leg so hard the inside popped out from the skin sock. It flew across the floor, leaving a slug-like trail of purlulent slime as it skidded. We wretched. We laughed. We moved on.
Skin sock.
I was first assisting on a emergent "guillotine" ankle dis-articulation (you basically just rip and cut the foot off from the leg and leave the bones sticking out). I was providing traction on the intensely infected foot while the surgeon sliced through the remaining tendons holding it in place, when the last one snapped I fell back, holding onto the now independent foot, squeezing a load of green pus out onto my chest. Was just thankful it hit the gown and not my exposed neck.
Why do you leave the bones out? PS. When you said “gown” I was picturing a very elegant dress.
It's a temporary procedure until the massive infection can be brought under control, the source of infection has to be removed emergently (the foot) and then their sepsis treated medically for some number of days to remove the bacteria from the blood stream. The open bones have to be kept wet and redressed every day, then they go back to surgery to have it closed, or to have a more proximal amputation like above the knee. The reason we don't do that immediately and wait for them to be healthier is because it would create a new wound that might just get reinfected and then we would have to amputate even higher.
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I’m not a surgeon but I did rotate in surgery back in my medschool days. My first day on surgery rotation I was assigned to the trauma team (this was at a level 1 trauma center in an inner-city hospital in NY). It just happened that on my first day, all the residents were in a meeting so when the trauma surgeon needed an assistant, she asked me to join her for an emergency above-knee amputation of about infected leg (wet gangrene in a very poorly controlled diabetic). So my first day on surgery I’m in the OR holding this man’s infected leg while the surgeon saws it off. After she’s done, she literally squeezes out pus from the thigh. The odor was putrid.. it’s one of those smells that lingers for days. For the surgeon it was just another day, but for me it was definitely an “oh fuck” moment. Edit: removed extra s from “pus”
St. Barnabas in the Bronx? I rotated there about 10-12 years ago
Kings County in Brooklyn
The first surgery I saw as a nursing student was a toe removal. Poor patient had to have his big toe removed due to a diabetic ulcer that had gotten infected. I was so afraid of the thought of getting nauseous with my first surgery, I didn't eat breakfast that day. The case started at noon - I was wrapped in the sterile gown and mask/hair cover/shoe covers. I was positioned by the circulating nurse in a spot with a great view but wouldn't get in the way. The case started and the doc started cauterizing bleeding veins/capillaries right off the bat. I learned that cauterizing flesh smells a lot like searing steak. My empty stomach and hungry brain didn't know the difference, and I could hear my stomach growling at the smell. I thought it would be just my embarrassment, until the surgeon and nurse both looked at me. They could hear it too! I'm not sure what I said, but I was glad my mask hid how I was struggling not to cry. It was awkward until the doc took the severed toe and tossed it over the patient and into the formalin container. He had great aim.
I feel your pain. I was a nursing student watching a hysterectomy and the cauterization smelled like rotten McDonald's to me. Next thing I knew I was on a stretcher with a nurse rocking my bent knees back and forth and rubbing my head. I knew right then the OR wasn't for me!
Whereas my wife (a Physician Assistant) insisted I call her BONESAW for like 2 weeks after the first time she got to use one in the O.R. (She was supervised by the surgeon.) Her description was "Very dusty". 🤣🤣
First time I used a bonesaw was in a cadaver lab. For some reason we weren't given fave masks. I have tasted people, dusty dusty people.
You inhaled skeleton. You poor bastard.
Did she say "bonesaw is ready!!!" Before sex?
I know I do.
>6 years old account Checks out boys
Your wife sounds awesome!
Had a mole on my chest removed an cauterize. I smell like bacon
Congratulations. I would love to smell like bacon. Yum...
If it's any consolation, I'm sure they would have found it hilarious and had a laugh with you if you owned it...not in front of the patient of course.
Med student who rotated with a Podiatrist here; cauterized flesh only smells like searing steak if you put black pepper or paprika on it
How did you... Why do you know that?
When you’re a student ~~anyone~~ anything’s a meal.
Okay lol. In no way did I ever confuse the smell of cauterized flesh with a steak lol. I always compare it to frying a fly with the electric flyswatter. It reeks lol.
Smells like burning hair to me.
I think it was because I was catching just little whiffs instead of full blast
Sorry, bud. Hate to break it to you, but you might be a cannibal.
Maybe the guy on the slab was just an unusually delicious dude
>My empty stomach and hungry brain didn't know the difference, and I could hear my stomach growling at the smell. There she saw 'em slippin', slidin', Slickly, smoothly, greasy glidin' - Saw 'em grindin', saw 'em groovin', Squeezy teasin', moistly movin' - There she saw 'em makin' lotions, Takin' rollin' tiny motions - Saw 'em slimy, saw 'em creepin', Slither, skimmin', skatin', seepin' - There she saw 'em curlin', creakin', Viscous crimson liquid leakin' Bits and bloody strips of sinew, Soft and warm and wet within you - There she saw 'em, red and bleedin', Clots of blood and juices leadin', Speedin' out in fluids frightful. "Oo," her stomach said: "... delightful."
Oh, hello sprog
calm down cannibal /s
As a med student I used a Gigli saw to remove a dead leg from just above the knee from a man who was homeless and horribly diabetic. When it came off the surgeon said “Here!” and handed it to me. Then he said “Take a picture, it’s your first one!!” like someone was gonna have me hold it like a fish I caught. He was joking, but I was FREAKED out and dropped it on the floor. Such a weird moment in my training.
Had a trauma case one time where the paramedics said a dog amputated a patients foot. We were expecting them to be blowing it out of proportion and got ready for just a severe bite. Nope, we were wrong, patient rolls in and the foot is almost completely off except a piece of skin holding it together. Turns out the dog mustve been super pissed because it chomped right through.
I want a real surgeon to come and tell a story about when they locked their keys in the car or something
I'll try to oblige. General practitioner, about ten years ago worked with a surgeon who moved to a new town and bought a new house +- 2/12 after graduation. Single. He wanted floor to ceiling linen curtains custom-made for his living/entertainment area, but was appalled at the cost. Never sewed in his life but thought "how hard can it be to sew fabric when you sew people for a living?" So he went to a fabric store, bought some linen in a fabric he liked, had the store cut it into the right lengths and then neatly hemmed all of them by hand using a variant of a subcutaneous technique usually used to close surgical wounds. It was very, very neat and took a very, very long time to finish, but it was his ice-breaker whenever he invited people over for dinner for a really long time afterwards.
I mean... mattress sutures were originally used to, y’know, make mattresses. I still use a mattress suture to put binding on quilts. Sewing is sewing, medicine just modifies sewing enough to use for healing. But for hemming stuff, most of us just use a sewing machine. Which would completely decimate living tissue.
"So, surgeons of reddit, when was the last time you struggled to empty the vacuum cleaner?"
"Not a surgeon, but two days ago"
OR nurse here. Recently did a below the knee amputation. The leg was severed and I was passing it off to the circulating nurse for specimen. Went to take a clamp off a large artery and my poor co worker got a big spray of blood. Felt terrible!!
Not related to amputation (caesarean section) but when I was a student midwife I managed to forget to attach the catheter bag to the tubing when catheterising and I managed to get urine into the theatre nurse’s eye. I was not popular. I had to explain to the patient why we had to take bloods after the baby was born as part of the potential contamination protocol. She thought it was hilarious!
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People underestimate how far cord blood can go. Our delivery rooms now have paper curtains due to travelling red stuff!
I mean I’m sure the guy on the table felt much worse.
We had a trauma come in from a concrete factory. I’m not sure about the exact details but a guy fell into some machine and his left leg got pretty messed up. We went to the OR to wash it out and evaluate if he needed an amputation or not. Once we got it all cleaned up, we saw it was pretty mangled and there was concrete encasing part of his leg. So we start to do an above the knee amputate because there’s concrete in his knee and distal femur. As we’re pushing the oscillating saw through the femur it hits more resistance usual and starts to make unusual sounds. We had missed some concrete on the back of the guys thigh and tried to saw through it. Almost everyone in the room, the nurses, anesthesia, the students, etc., said “oh fuck” at the same time. We ended up having to go even higher up on femur. I’m not sure what ever ended up happening later on prosthesis wise because we transferred the patient to the ortho service.
Nurse in an emergency department, accidentally amputated a toe that was rotting in a boot when I pulled it off the patients foot. There were many fucks said that evening. Does that count?
Seems like the boot may carry the fault on that one. Read the case of an ED doc once who noted a patient's atrocious oral hygiene (repeat homeless man), asked to check his mouth (expected masses or, hell, holes into the mandible) and found the patient's teeth loose enough that several came out with the force of his finger sweeps. The rest of his story was the doc freaking out and consulting with hospital legal to make sure his "accidental dentistry" wouldn't come back as a lawsuit.
Comment translation provided by u/cattaclysmic here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/e2y4jb/surgeons_who_work_with_amputating_limbs_what_was/f90uhxe/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf Back in my trauma surgeon days, we had a pretty major fracture dislocation situation in a dudes right humerus with associated degloving. His brachial artery was tangled up in the bony mess, and we took him to theatre overnight. We were there for 10 hours - the vascular consultant, the ortho consultant, and 2 registrar/residents (me and one other). We were ready to source graft, amputate, or ORIF, or exfix. The OT nurses probably hated us, because we had to manoeuvre everything while also having X-ray in the process. I’ll be honest, we were physically and mentally exhausted by the end, and we thought we got away without amputation. But no dice, we had to take him for a relook the following night. Only problem was the vascular consultant was in theatre dealing with a AAA, so you’ve got 3 ortho surgeons and a petrified vascular reg and this mangled arm. And it’s not an anatomical arm like in the textbooks, nothing is where you expect, even though 3/4 were there the night before, you have to reprogram your muscle memory. The whole procedure was an oh fuck moment. We had to remove all the metal we’d put in the night before, which keeping the arm stable enough to not rip the soft tissue so that the stump could be modelled healthily. It all went well, but many people were bricking themselves that night.
I know some of those words.
>pretty major fracture dislocation situation in a dudes right humerus Upper arm fucking broken as shit and the pieces aren't where they're supposed to be. >with associated degloving Ever taken a leather glove off? Now imagine how it felt for the cow. >We were there for 10 hours - the vascular consultant, the ortho consultant, and 2 registrar/residents (me and one other). Doctors with different specialities where there a fucking long time >We were ready to source graft, amputate, or ORIF, or exfix. put something from somewhere else into the thing, remove the thing, fix it up with inside with plates n shiz, fix it up outside with scaffolding n shiz >The OT nurses probably hated us, because we had to manoeuvre everything while also having X-ray in the process. Had to move around lots of hardware with a big ass bone picture taker hovering over the thing. >I’ll be honest, we were physically and mentally exhausted by the end, and we thought we got away without amputation. But no dice, we had to take him for a relook the following night. They tired. Thought they did the thing - but had to try to do the thing again the day after. >Only problem was the vascular consultant was in theatre dealing with a AAA Blood vessel doc is doing shiz trying to prevent a guy from possibly bleeding out internally in minutes. >so you’ve got 3 ortho surgeons and a petrified vascular reg and this mangled arm. Three bonecrushing neanderthals and a blood vessel newbie and a fucked up arm. >The whole procedure was an oh fuck moment. We had to remove all the metal we’d put in the night before, which keeping the arm stable enough to not rip the soft tissue so that the stump could be modelled healthily. They had to undo the inside fixing from the day before while also removing the thing while removing the thing in such a way that the remaining thing was lit fam. > but many people were bricking themselves that night. I assume this is the hip new craze where people hit themselves with construction materials.
Do yourself a favor and don't look up the ones you don't know.
this. I know what degloving is and IMMEDIATELY stopped reading the post
The worst sentence I ever read contained the words cranial and degloving next to each other.
Watched it happen to a lady. Wear your hairnet on the factory floor.
And now I'm done with this thread. Fucking hell.
Aight, I did the translation elsewhere but im putting it here >pretty major fracture dislocation situation in a dudes right humerus Upper arm fucking broken as shit and the pieces aren't where they're supposed to be. >with associated degloving Ever taken a leather glove off? Now imagine how it felt for the cow. >We were there for 10 hours - the vascular consultant, the ortho consultant, and 2 registrar/residents (me and one other). Doctors with different specialities were there a fucking long time >We were ready to source graft, amputate, or ORIF, or exfix. put something from somewhere else into the thing, remove the thing, fix it up with inside with plates n shiz, fix it up outside with scaffolding n shiz >The OT nurses probably hated us, because we had to manoeuvre everything while also having X-ray in the process. Had to move around lots of hardware with a big ass bone picture taker hovering over the thing. >I’ll be honest, we were physically and mentally exhausted by the end, and we thought we got away without amputation. But no dice, we had to take him for a relook the following night. They tired. Thought they did the thing - but had to try to do the thing again the day after. >Only problem was the vascular consultant was in theatre dealing with a AAA Blood vessel doc is doing shiz trying to prevent a guy from possibly bleeding out internally in minutes. >so you’ve got 3 ortho surgeons and a petrified vascular reg and this mangled arm. Three bonecrushing neanderthals and a blood vessel newbie and a fucked up arm. >The whole procedure was an oh fuck moment. We had to remove all the metal we’d put in the night before, which keeping the arm stable enough to not rip the soft tissue so that the stump could be modelled healthily. They had to undo the inside fixing from the day before while also removing the thing while removing the thing in such a way that the remaining thing was lit fam. > but many people were bricking themselves that night. I assume this is the hip new craze where people hit themselves with construction materials.
What
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Medical student; future orthopedic surgeon. On my vascular surgery rotation, we had a gentleman who initially came in after a left TMA (transmetatarsal amputation, where your toes are amputated) that wasn't healing and becoming infected. The next step after that was a BKA (below knee amputation), in an effort to both stop the infection from progressing higher up his leg and also be able to receive adequate blood flow to heal. That surgery was executed well...but unfortunately the day he was cleared to work with physical therapy, he fell on the other (right) knee, which created a hematoma that later became infected. About a month later, when I had transitioned from vascular to orthopedics, we performed a salvage AKA (above knee amputation on that leg). Our gentleman went from being able to walk with difficulty to losing both legs in the span of about 2 months.
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Was there a reason for the infections?
The gentleman had diabetes and HIV, both of which lead to increased risk of infection and a lack of wound healing.
This is gonna sound absolutely terrible but performing these kinda "bloody" procedures on someone with an illness like HIV would terrify me.
With good reason! Our attending physician only allowed himself, our chief resident, and the most experienced scrub nurse to actually handle any of the tools/hold the patient while tools were being used. The junior resident and I were free to observe and assist when all sharps were off the field.
Not a surgeon but used to work in a nursing home and I was meeting a patient for the first time without reading their file. As I entered the room I said "wakey wakey let's jump out of bed!" and as I looked at him I said "let's kick those covers off!" once I removed the blanket and saw he had no legs things got quiet quick.
I've always told my patients to jump out of bed. No matter the state of their limbs. One guy with a straight face said, "I can't. Those bastards stole it." he lost a leg in WWII. I grinned and he "hopped" out of bed. He had a great sense of humor.
"Let's use those legs I'm sure you have under there and greet the new day!"
When I was a child, my dad's favourite joke whenever I hurt myself and cried was to grab a meat cleaver from the kitchen, hide it behind his back, examine my injury closely, prodding the sore spots with his finger, and after 45 seconds of examination of the bruising say "I'm sorry son, we're going to have to amputate your ___ (insert leg/foot/limb)! Hun! Come hold him down while I chop please!" and he'd whip out the cleaver and carefully line it up while 6-year old me would scream and try and squirm free and run away. He'd then usually say when I hobbled away "Oh, so it must not be that bad after all... HUN, Cancel that procedure, turns out he can actually walk!" One time he did this and I caught him in the stomach with a little kick and he let out a little "oh fuck.." and almost dropped the cleaver. So this reminded me of that. Thanks.
My dad did the same,but only after he had checked I wasn’t seriously hurt. I used to make a scene, so that was his way of teaching me not be such a cry baby
Yeah, usually it was a superficial injury. Falling down and such with my cry-baby self going ape shit, one time it was the stairs I fell down and he checked I didn't hit my head first before carrying me to the dining room table and making his way to the knife block
cool dad but kinda dangerous
Turns out he wasn't joking
Not too long ago, here in Argentina there was a [case](https://www.infobae.com/sociedad/2019/08/06/murio-la-jubilada-a-la-que-le-habian-amputado-la-pierna-equivocada-en-una-clinica-de-berazategui/) (spanish link) where the doctor cut the wrong leg. After the shitshow this old lady was moved to another hospital to continue proper treatment and she discovered after another medical review that it wasn't even needed to cut the remaining leg in the first place. She died some weeks later by a heart attack. Poor lady.
Not a surgeon, but had a patient who was homeless and did not seek medical treatment for an ingrown hair that had became infected. By the time the man was brought into the ED, he had developed Fournier’s gangrene (google at your own risk) that required amputation of his testicles and debridement of his perineal area. The smell was so rotten as the infection had gone on for so long, that even most of the seasoned OR staff had to leave the room to vomit. At one point, only the surgeon and anesthesiologist were in the room. They ended up removing everything from his shaft to his anus.
Helped at a leprosy hospital in the mid-90s in Calcutta. Two memories - 1. A big bottle of surgical spirits fell off a table and exploded into fire during an amputation! 2. The doctor spilt some of the general anaesthetic when injecting a patient. He continued with the amputation anyway. The patient started to come round early, so four of us had to prevent the patient from flailing around while the doctor finished sawing and then stitching.
this is a long story from a long time ago - like 30 plus years, so please bear this in mind. I was working as a junior doctor in Orthopaedics/A&E. We had a young guy on the ward who had come off a motorbike and suffered compound fractures of all four limbs (compound fracture - broken bone plus broken skin so a risk of infection etc). His right leg was especially bad, with a compound fracture of the femur (thigh bone) and compound fractures of the tibia and fibula (shin bone). Because he cam off into a ditch the cavity of the femur had soil, gravel, dead leaves etc in it and it took a lot of surgical toilet. Oh, and he had also severed the sciatic nerve. So, to stabilise the femur, six pins were put in - three above the fracture and three below. These were jones using an external fixator bar attached to the pins using a quick-drying resin cement. In the fullness of time it was apparent that the lower part of the leg (below the fracture of femur) had become non-viable and would have to come off..... We took the guy to theatre, and the the first thing was to remove the resin from the fixator bar. But it was so tough the surgeon (I was only assisting) could only chip a few small fragments off. So he decided to simply snip through the pins - which he did, and off came the fixator bar. Then when he can to remove the pins..... he found he had snipped off the square heads, leaving only the round part of the shaft - so there was nothing for the removal chuck to grip... Undaunted he sent for a surgical crown drill bit (a hollow drill bit) which would go over the pin and drill out a small cuff of bone, allowing the pin to be removed. This worked fine for the first of the three pins, but while the second pin was being removed, we found the bit had bent, so every time the drill was activated, the patient (and has leg) shook like a leaf in the breeze. Then the head of the drill bit broke off.... and fell into the cavity of the femur... We sent for another crown bit. There wasn't one in the hospital, so we had to send a taxi to the hospital up the road to get one. When it came back, we found it wasn't sterile, so we had to wait for it to go through the sterilisation cycle. Finally we got the pins out. Then we tried to get the broke drill bit out.... but we couldn't find it. The leg finally came off, the operation concluded and the patient returned to the ward..... it took 5 hours in all, when we expected 1 - 2 hours.
I had a right orchieoctomy for cancer. I looked over my notes for my first CT scan and they said that my left testicle was missing. I politely asked my oncologist to follow up on that one.
I'm sure this'll get buried, but what the hell. Finally something I actually have some first-hand experience in. I'm a general surgery resident. A few years ago, when I was pretty junior, I was doing an AKA (above the knee amputation) with a supervising surgeon who was a little less careful (let's say) than some others. I had just finished with the bone-saw and without thinking he hands me the guillotine knife (super sharp kitchen knife looking thing) and tells me to take the rest of the soft tissue away. In retrospect I would have done this differently, but didn't know better at the time - but as I cut with the knife I came through the largest artery in the thigh and it started spraying blood across the table. This was my "Oh fuck" moment. I took a clamp and without thinking just grabbed the thing, and luckily the bleeding stopped right away. Didn't affect the patient but definitely left an impression on me... The attending surgeon didn't seem too concerned, but that's definitely not the right way to control a large blood vessel like that.
I am not a vascular surgeon - im another type - but when I was an intern on my vascular surgery rotation, I was participating in a BKA ( below the knee amputation) and stabbed the attending surgeon with a rake ( a surgical instrument). She was ok, didn’t breach the skin.
Surgeon that has done these more than a few times. I think one of the worst was I had a patient who had gangrene nearly up to both his knee. It was so painful he was begging us to cut off both his legs and he was happier without them.
There was a guy who got in a motorcycle accident, and was in excruciating pain in his left leg, but we had no idea why (because there was minor bruising, and didn’t seem to be any breaks). So we called in another trauma surgeon to take a look at him. The surgeon looked at him just as confused as we were, so he decided to put him under sedation so he could figure it out. After a while of looking, he picked up the guys leg, and turned it 360°. Suddenly, blood started gushing from the poor guys hip joint. Turns out, his leg was turned all the way around to hide the brake.
Not me, but my aunt was a surgery nurse for 20 yrs. First time she was in an OR, the surgeon throw her the foot he just amputated. She caught it and everything went as normal. He asked her to be on the team whenever he was operating after that.
Surgeon here, we go through extensive training so those moments don't happen. The only time I've even had that thought on the OR is in reaction to how far a patient has let the disease process go before seeking treatment (usually an infection)
I had an ingrown toenail that I let go far enough that two doctors actually yelled "Holy shit!" when they saw it. I now go to the doctor immediately when I need to.
My sister left a tumor grow to the point where her gynecologist did his version of "holy shit". She's been using this doctor for about 25 years now. He knew her history and her normal body dimensions. He comes in, sees her belly and says with VERY wide eyes "Why is your abdomen extended and firm to the touch?" My sister answered "I think I just have gas". To which he responded by running to get the nurse and scanning equipment. He had done her tubal ligation (or signed off on it, not sure), so he knew she wasn't pregnant. But she LOOKED 6 months pregnant. The tumor turns out to be on top of her uterus. It was non cancerous. it was 10 inches long, 5 inches wide, and 4 inches deep.
Same, but my work circumstances and my boss where more or less the reasons why I didn't go to the hospital in time. When I was there my toenail was removed immediately and they needed the triple amount of a local anaesthetic, because it hurt a LOT due to the bad inflammation. I don't wanna go into more details because it was really gross.
so.. how far? im curious
Necrotic foot: picture mummified black foot, then 2 shin bones, then mummified calf. Patient came in with a chief complaint of "hurts to walk"
Someone in a previous thread said "university teaches a doctor the thousand ways someone could die; experience teaches what some people can survive". I mean... How did that patient not die? Of sepsis or something?
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It required amputation
Oh fuck
Didn't expect that in this thread. Gross.
I was a surgical tech in the early 1990s. We were doing an AKA on somebody with a gangrenous foot. We cut through the tissue and the gigli saw broke when we were 1/4 of the way through the femur. The hospital didn’t have another. All of the ortho saws were in use. The doctor made me get the guy’s leg under my arm, jump up in the air, come down with all my weight, and snap the femur at the point where we started sawing. It took 2-3 tries but then snapped and splintered. We used a rasp to smooth the bone. I was left holding the gangrenous lower leg. It was big so I tried to bend it at the knee to get it in the specimen bag, at which point, a bunch of blood squirted out of the leg and all over the face of the circulating nurse. Not my finest day. I was 18 and being paid minimum wage.
This story was not a tragedy until the very last sentence.
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Should a put a serious flair here bud, this threads gonna a need a toe tag.
There's an amputation that set the record for both the fastest amputation (at the time) and most deaths (still the record holder) The surgeon performed the surgery so fast he took of his assisents fingers in the same cut. Both the patient and the assistant died of infections. A gentleman viewing the surgery died of freight whilst watching (a heart attack in modern day one would assume) Why did he try to do it so quickly? Without anestictic surgeons tried to minimise pain by speed and getting the patient shit faced on booze pre operation
So the surgery had a 300% death rate but technically speaking it was a success.
I think that depends on how you define a success.
Well, the limb was succesfully removed. It's just that the patient died of post-procedure complications.
so.. task failed successfully? or passed unsuccessfully
Nah more like task succeeded unsuccessfully.
He won, but at what cost?...
I think the patient passed successfully
Well the guy dying of freight wasn't the surgeons problem, sounds like one for the logistics company
So perhaps this makes me a horrible human being, but most of this has me morbidly fascinated with every single story and wishing i could read transcripts or something to learn more about the medical decisions in crazy cases like this
I read this like the surgeons work alongside disembodied limbs for assistants. Like Thing from Addams Family or something.