Appendectomy

Today, Saturday was a great day. I added another procedure to my bag of tricks. I showed up at the hospital to at 6:30 am, my resident said I could come in late because it was Saturday, and I rounded on our vascular patients in the surgical ICU (SICU). It was great to see the Polish patient because he was doing so well. This was the guy who we had done several procedures on in an attempt to save his leg. This was the first day that he and his family were all smiles. His leg looked good. There still is a good chance that the grafts could fail, but there is also some hope as he appears to be doing well and we were able to get some pulses in his foot.

What do I do when I "round" on our patients. I check their surgical wounds for infection and change the dressings. I review how they did over night with the SICU physician. I look at their latest labs and medications and make any necessary changes. I usually run all of my thoughts by my resident. For example today one of our patients blood tests revealed that she was at risk for bleeding  so I lowered her heparin (anticoagulant medication used to prevent strokes). 

After seeing all of my patients I got paged for an appendectomy case that had presented to the ER. My chief resident and I made are way to the patient to examine and confirm the diagnosis of appendicitis. Sure enough she had appendicitis so we cleared an OR and made our way to the surgical unit to do an appendectomy. This was a great procedure and because it was Saturday the attending did not want to be bothered so he let us do most of the case. It was great to see this procedure and to be able to help do it. We did an open appendectomy through a 4 cm incision. It is a rather quick procedure and there are a handful of pitfalls to avoid but it was relatively easy. The appendix was in fact about to perforate so it was good that we did the procedure before she perforated as this causes a lot of extra complications. 

After I finished today I was actually disappointed to be leaving the hospital. I wanted to get home to see my girls but this is the first job where working on a Saturday seemed enjoyable. Hopefully this feeling sticks around for a while.