Or not. This wasn’t a particularly gory operation. No brains, no bone saws, and just a little tiny incision. Lots of x-rays though, so if I start glowing I’ll know who to blame.
That’s not really fair though. I had a nice lead apron to wear for the whole time… Very warm and cozy. And I think it was made from some extraordinary new alloy that increases in weight over time. It started out at about 3 pounds, but it was up to nearly 20 by the end of the second procedure. It was warm though. My front was sweating up a storm the whole time, while my back was freezing. Surgical scrubs have roughly the same insulating properties as a thin cotton bedsheet, and they’re just about as stylish.
The two patients were in for the same thing: Fracture reduction! Basically, they’d each broken one of the bones in their wrists and the two bits of bone needed to be held together so that they’d heal. You do this with a specially designed screw. It has widely spaced threads near the tip and narrow ones near the head, so that the front of the screw tries to go through things faster than the back. The result is that as it goes through two pieces of bone, it pulls them together until they’re snug.
To get the screw in place the doc did something called a “Closed reduction.” Instead of slicing the whole wrist open, shoving tendons nerves and arteries aside and screwing things together, there was a lot of work with wires. Basically, the doc made a tiny slice in the back of the forearm and then drilled a guide hole with a fine bit of wire through the wrist and out the palm of the hand near the thumb, taking x-rays all the way to make sure things were lined up correctly. Then there was a bit of work with a bigger drill to make room for the screw, followed by a couple quick twists with a surgical screwdriver. The nifty thing is that the big drill, the screw and the screwdriver are all hollow tubes, so they all slide along the guide wire and into place. Once the screw is in, the guide wire gets yanked, then after a few stitches, some gauze, and a light splint later the patient is ready to go…
The first guy had a few complications, so he took a while. His guide wire broke inside the big drill, so they had to run a second wire. Then they couldn’t get the wire fragment out of the drill bit, so they had to get a second drill out of storage and sterilize it. Plus he had some floating bone bits from his original injury that they needed to suction out with a little orthoscopic gadget before they caused tendon damage. It took about an hour and a half, all told. At the end, when they brought him out of sedation, he tried to get up and walk out of the OR. He was a big beefy guy too – about 6′ 6″ and 350+ lbs of tattoos and muscle, so it took four people to get him to stay on the table long enough for him to wake up and realize that going for a walk was a bad idea…
The second surgery was fast. No complications, no surprises. In and out of the OR in under an hour. And it was a lot of fun to tape. The doc kept calling me in to do close-ups of different stages, and I did a lot of over-his-shoulder and top-down work using the monopod as a sort of camera boom. Sometimes I love my job.