Another thing I need to learn to be a real surgeon: When doing an open abdominal case on a patient who’s had practically any previous operations, there are bound to be adhesions to some extent (unless they’re on chronic steroids, in which case you get the prednisone effect – wonderfully smooth going in, and the near-certainty that they won’t heal afterwards). Depending on how many surgeries and where, and the patient’s genetic tendency toward scarring, there will be more or less adhesions, and it will be more or less difficult to get where you’re going.
When dissecting the adhesions apart in order to get to the underlying structures, you have to protect the bowel somehow. Touching the intestines with the bovie (electrocautery) is very much frowned upon, and can lead to all kinds of complications, ranging from post-op abscesses to enterocutaneous fistulas.
There’s a really simple maneuver to help avoid this. You slip your gloved finger under the band of adhesions, separating it from the bowel underneath. Then you bovie on your finger.
The bovie is hot.
This can really hurt.
If you don’t time it just right, you can go right through the glove into your finger.
The good surgeons 1) know how to time it, and 2) care more about protecting the patient than about how hot their fingers get.
I am still a source of frustration to my mentors for two reasons: If I ever have to put my hand under the bovie, I can’t take the heat, and I back off way too soon, which makes it take forever to get anything done (which is too bad, because it’s quite a privilege to be given the responsibility of putting your hand under and guiding where the incisions will be made, and I hate to mess up when an attending lets me do that). Or, when it’s their hand in there, I hit it. Either way, not popular.
I need to do some more surgeries.
September 14, 2008 at 12:09 am
So how bad is it when you hit their glove? Does it burn their skin?
September 14, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Worse, it cuts the glove and burns the hand, plus destroying your sterile field and exposing your colleague to blood.
September 14, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Would wearing a thimble under your gloves be an option? I know the whole scrubbing hands thing that you surgeons do, but surely there must be a better way of protecting yourself.
September 14, 2008 at 7:34 pm
lol, Julia, good point. There is actually a safer technique, in which you place a hemostat or tonsil under the tissue to be divided, and then bovie on that. It’s certainly safer for your hands, but has the disadvantages of being slower, you can’t feel where you’re going, and instrument has an unpleasant habit of jerking wildly as you release the tension on it, which can lead to the bovie hitting things accidentally.
Thimble would be nice, but I’m afraid it doesn’t accord with sterile technique at all.