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?
In: 4243
There’s sometimes like 15 layers of stuff between what surgeons are getting at and their tools, so it takes a lot of time to carefully move a lot of things to the side and stich them all back up appropriately. Sometimes they have to mechanically file away at things, carefully screw things into bones without cracking them, or carefully saw through bones to do what they need to. There’s also a lot of prep work, labs, anesthesiology that all takes time. Sometimes they have to reconnect blood vessels too.
Think how long it takes to assemble an ikea desk, but if you make a single wrong move someone dies, and it’s like 30 times more finnicky, and you also have to disasseble it when you’re done
Am surgeon: If I am ever operating for 36 hours straight, a good portion of that will be cursing. Some personal pep talks. Mostly it’s the cursing though.
The nearly 16 hour surgery that essentially saved my leg from being amputated was two surgeons in tandem.
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.
Latest Answers