Another surgery Wednesday!

Sorry I haven't posted anything in a while, but the end of last week and beginning of this week was really uneventful. Mostly just routine visits - lots of annual exams and prenatal checkups. I'm getting much better at doing just about everything, though! Today was a cool day in surgery - I saw a tubal ligation that was done with this new-ish procedure that just involves putting little metal coils inside the fallopian tubes. Then, the tubes heal around the coils and block the tubes so fertilization can't happen! The procedure only took about 10 minutes, and it was cool because the doctor used a scope to see inside the uterus to place the coils, so that was interesting! Our next case was a more run-of-the-mill vaginal hysterectomy, and I got to hold the bladder retractor again. Thankfully, today I was standing so that I could use my right hand to hold the retractor instead of my left, so it wasn't as taxing as last week! The last surgery was a complicated one. It started out as just a regular laparoscopic supracervical hysterectomy, but once we were inside the abdomen we could see that there wer a ton of adhesions - meaning that the uterus was basically stuck to the abdominal wall. It took about an hour just to cut it free so they could start the actual procedure! There was also a lot of bleeding during the surgery. All in all, what should have been a 90-minute procedure ended up taking about three hours! The coolest part was the tool they used to take out the uterus at the end. I was wondering the whole time how they were going to do it - since the cervix was going to be left intact, and there were only four small incisions on the abdomen, I thought it would be pretty difficult to get a big uterus with multiple fibroids out. But there was this tool that basically carves the uterus into little finger-sized strips by spinning it around a blade, kind of like an apple corer. Then, the strips are sucked out through one of the holes in the abdomen! Pretty cool. After that, there was a delivery, so we went to go do that right after the hysterectomy patient was closed. The delivery was fairly normal, but the baby had aspirated some meconium during birth, and had to be monitored closely. When I left, the baby still wasn't 100% stable, but my preceptor seemed confident that he would make a full recovery.

Whew! It was a long day, but full of good experiences. It's also really great that my preceptor, along with the other doctor he works with and all the OR nurses, is really funny and nice. It definitely makes long, stressful surgeries easier to handle and more fun!