Came back from surgery today and was awestruck at how some people can make up stories and completely throw off others' perceptions.


We always said: the source of the info is just as important as the info itself.

When it comes to doing a bypass, which is like making an extra road around a vein or artery in the heart that has been blocked by something, you need to bring a vein from somewhere else - a vein that won't be missed.

That's the popliteal vein, and it runs from your groin down to the inside of your ankle.  The funny thing is, there's so many more veins in your leg that can take up the slack that if we remove this vein, your leg won't miss it. 

So we remove it and use it to make a bypass - removing it in English is called "harvesting" which really makes me think of a guy in coveralls with straw in his mouth; no such luck in Spanish, as the nurses and the doctors made fun of me for trying to do a direct translation ("cosechar").

Anyways, our anatomy teacher who happened to be a plastic surgeon mentioned how he was deciding exactly what kind of surgeon he would be and really thought he would like the vascular side of the house.  He did a shadow with one, and described in gory detail how he saw this other doctor make two incisions, one at the top of the leg and one at the bottom, cut the popliteal vein at both incisions, put his leg up to prop himself, and then pull hard to tear the vein right out of the patient's leg!!  You can imagine how we squirmed, and he basically said "and that's when I went into plastics."

Today I assisted in the harvesting of a popliteal vein in a 35 year old man who needed a quadruple bypass and let me tell you - it is the most intricate, detail-oriented surgery I've seen yet.  I helped put tiny staples (about 1/3 normal size) in all the branches of the vein and it took us about 2-3 hours of ensuring the vein was not leaky, was sealed by us, and that the patient was not bleeding at any moment in time. 

Then the doctor I was assisting helped the main cardiac surgeon to do the bypass - and that took another 3-4 hours.  All in all we were there for about 8 hours.  We were all so careful (and I was so happy and glad to be able to partake in such an amazing operation) that the total blood loss, in 8 hours, was about 300-400 mL.

Think about that.

And shame on that anatomy professor - how could you just rip one of the longest veins out of a patient with brute force and NOT have the patient bleed to shock or death?

The source is just as important as the info.

Just started the blog! Hopefully I'll update often since this one will be topical rathe than general. Rock solid.