What exactly are they doing the entirety of those hours? Are they literally just cutting and stitching and suctioning the entire time? Do they have breaks?
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I can contribute to this. I’m a urologist, and though I’ve never done a 36 hour surgery (those are very, very rare) I have done 16-18 hour surgeries. We removed a kidney with a tumor that extended to the heart, and was plastered to the liver. We opened up and exposed the kidney (3-4 hours), and then allowed the transplant surgeons to step in. Though it wasn’t a transplant, they deal extensively with hepatobiliary surgery, so they spent 2-4 hours carefully resecting the kidney from the liver to assure there was no damage to surrounding organs/vasculature. Then the cardiothoracic surgeons took over, put the patient on bypass, and opened the right atrium to visualize the tumor. They removed the cardiac portion and closed the heart to resume natural circulation (5-7 hours). Our team took back over to transect the kidney vasculature and removed the kidney (2-3 hours). Closure took some time after that.
These huge surgeries, as others have noted, take an extensive amount of time and multiple surgical teams to complete.
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