Boobs, balls, and hundreds of tiny knots

I have been having some very medical schooly days lately. I'm back in Portland now, and am deep into my second week of my plastic surgery elective. Boob jobs and eyebrow lifts and botox and tummy tucks and liposuction and scar revisions and hand contracture releases and carpal tunnel releases and laceration repairs and sex reassignment surgery. These are all things that I have witnessed and/or participated in. This has included me holding a testicle in my hand as it is removed from its transexual owner. It has included me feeling the odd, gritty sensation of crudely jamming a metal rod through a lady's subcutaneous fat as I liposuction her abdomen. It includes also the strangely powerful feeling of smoothly cutting through someone's skin, and the satisfying tug of multiple suture removals.

The thing, though, that has dominated my thoughts as I plod through this rotation, is sewing. Suturing. Tying. "Throwing knots." I have gotten to do a lot of it. And I need to do a lot more of it, because - lets face it - I suck at suturing.

I spent thursday night practicing at home, with the instruments that I borrowed from my preceptor. I spent a couple hours putting rows of running sutures into an old t-shirt in preparation for friday. Friday was kind of a big day, because it was to be just me and the plastic surgeon in the OR all day long. Me as the first assist. No residents to hog all the good stuff. That meant that on the panniculectomy and abdominoplasty (aka tummy tuck) he would stitch up one side of her belly and i would stitch up the other. I would be responsible for stopping small spurting bleeds with the bovie electrocautery wand while he was busy reinforcing the rectus fascia. I would clip off the small subcutaneous vessels as he was dissecting through the adipose tissue. And the coolest thing about the whole experience is that I would ask for instruments from the scrub nurse, and they would give them to me!

I would say "clip please" and hold out my hand and a clip would be placed in my hand! They would just put it in my hand!! Like a real surgeon!!! "Suture scissors." In hand. "Can I get another pick-ups please?" In hand. "I'll take a 3.0 monocryl to close please" In my hand like magic. I didn't get to say "scalpel!" but I did get to have one placed in my hand multiple times after the surgeon said "scalpel to Fiona."

Not to say that it all went super smoothly, or that I didn't have to change my left glove because I got a suture needle stuck in it, or that I didn't manage to tangle the suture tie in a knot not once but twice during the day, or that I didn't cut the bone wires too short so that the surgeon had to completely remove them and drill them in again, or that the last surgery of the day didn't end with my preceptor, the scrub nurse, the circulating nurse, and the anesthesiologist all watching as I very awkwardly and slowly closed the incision site. But it was really really fun.

And then my long day, which started in the OR at 7:30 am, ended as I showed up to the last 10 minutes of Jona's 25th Birthday Show... wearing scrubs. With blood on them. Just kidding. Kind of. KIDDING! Really. (There was no blood on my scrubs.) But there was blood on my shoes. Kidding!