ENT surgeon here. The procedures are sometimes extremely arduous and time consuming because you have to be so very delicate to avoid unnecessary damage.
For example operation a cancer in the throat with metastasis in the neck will consist of locating and slowly delicately uncover and expose all branches of the lower facial nerve (controls your mouth and cheek muscles). This takes around 4-6 hours.
Once you know where every branch is you can work around it to remove the tumour, but if it is located in a difficult spot you sometimes have to cut the jaw in half to make room so that you can reach in to the back of the throat. All the while you are constantly cauterising small blood vessels. It’s very arduous.
Once that’s finally done (12-16h) you start by dissecting the side of the neck to remove all lymph nodes and metastasises. Again watching out for important nerves which controls tongue movement etc.
Should you encounter difficulties you might have to change your approach and enter specific compartments form a different angle which takes a long time.
In short – yes we do cut and stitch and suction more or less all the time. And we take brakes and nurses sometimes brings us lemonade to keep us from getting too grumpy.
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