What is awesome?
Day surgery is effing awesome...well at least from an observational perspective.
I spent the day in Day Surgery and I got to see:
4 Colonoscopies
1 Gastroscope
1 Vasectomy
1 Ganglion RemovalI also go to take out four saline lock needles from the dorsum of five different hands...which was where they injected the Fentanyl used to freeze the patients for their Colonoscopies.
It was BLOODY thrilling...to the MAX.
The Colonoscope (which is a thin, flexible tube with a camera on the end of it) is inserted into the rectum and then pushed up into the large intestines. You can see all the action on these large LSD screens and it FABTASTIC. The guts are pink and rippled and pretty. You could see what the person had eaten recently; I saw what looked like eggs and cucumber seeds. One guy had really bubbly bile and so the surgeon pressed a button on the colonoscope which shot water up into the bowels and he washed all the bubbles away.
Watching the Dr. brandish that scope and wield it around all the curves and corners of the large intestines reminded me of Dr. Octopus and his many robotic arms from Spiderman.
One woman had a polyps, which is a tiny extra bit of tissue that can turn cancerous so the Dr. used this little pincher thing on the end of the colonoscope to pick it off. It bled. On the screen the polyps looked like it was the size of an almond but when the pincher came out of the colon, the polyps was really only the size of a pin head.
I SO hope to all the YE GODS out there that I never have to have an exploratory tube shoved up my guts, I’d rather DIE OF SHAME, thanks.
The Gastroscope was similar only the tube was shoved down the mouth route instead. The woman had to drink a solution which diminished her gag reflex and then we could see inside her stomach and small intestines and it was GLORIOUS because I got to see all the ulcers inside her stomach. They were raw and bled when the Dr. pressed the scope against them.
It was some cool ass HOOPLA I say.
Then I thought that the vasectomy would be a long procedure but really it only took like ten minutes and buddy spent the entire time talking about how he’s into photography and all the cool pics he’s taken.
The Dr. got buddy to hup into the operating table. Then he took this bloody ENORMOUS needle...it looked like a 16 gauge needle to me and loaded it up with Xylocaine. He then froze one size of buddy’s scrotum, hacked it open, cut off some of the vas deferens, sutured it together and did the same to the other guy. All buddy ever felt was the needle going in but not the slicing.
Then the Dr. held out that cut up piece of vas deferens and let me grope it for a while. The vas deferens is a hard tube and when you press it, it won’t flatten so the Dr. explained that that was how he knew he was severing the vas deferens and not the seminal vesicles for example.
The last procedure I saw of the day was a ganglion cyst removal. A ganglion was this swelling sac on top of the ankle; it was clear and looked like a cataract. The good Dr. cut open buddy’s ankle and oh did buddy ever yodel. The Dr. kept injecting Xylocaine into the tissue surrounding the cyst and still the buddy could feel the Dr. hacking into his foot. The Dr. ending up injecting two of those plastic bars of Xylocaine into this guy and
still he could feel the Dr. sawing away.
The cyst was really attached to the ankle and it was stubborn; the Dr. took ages shearing the cyst from the tissue with his little scalpel. Then he cut into the ganglion and all this clear, gelatinous caviar-like material came oozing. One of the nurses scooped that shit up and stuffed it into a specimen jar to send down to the lab. I felt so bad for buddy, he was shrieking and hollering and could feel the pressure of metal against his joint, in spite of all the local anaesthesia he’d received. It was a longer then expected procedure, since the cyst was being stubborn as the Dr. put it.
I wasn’t complaining though, it was bloody GLORIOUS...in more ways then one.
Mans, the only suck thing about being in Day Surgery was that I couldn’t DO anything other then stand around and watch; I wanted to hack some fishy-filled Foots up!
And that’s some pretty nifty alliteration to end with.