Why do some surgeries take so long (like upwards of 24 hours)? What exactly are they doing?
In: Biology
You should search on YouTube complete knee replacement. There is a video somewhere shows step by step. Spoiler, it involves lots of bone cutting and smoothing and adjustments. (Cut here, adjust and file, cut, test, adjust and file etc). Just time consuming.
I’m sure a surgeon can answer better than me, but seeing surgeries on Youtube, the difference between cutting up a cattle and performing surgery is that you are taking care not to damage something else during the act of surgery. Attention to detail and careful movements.
Ortho surgeries is literally carpentry on your bones. Some complicated surgeries are non-routine and take extra care at each step, sometime requiring 2-3 surgeons deciding the best next step every step. Im not a surgeon though so take this with a grain of salt.
Some things in surgery take a very long time
Removal of complex tumors, especially when they’re close to or growing into important things you don’t want to hurt. In neurosurgery for example you may need to take a tumor that’s been growing for 10 years off the brainstem and a bunch of nerves that are like 2mm thick wet spaghetti. And if you injure them the patient can’t smile, swallow, see, or talk. And they may be paralyzed or just not wake up. You can’t rush that, you have to work millimeter by millimeter
Reconstruction, like if you take someone’s face off,
you need to replace it with something that has good blood supply and connecting that and sewing it in takes a long time
Transplants can take a long time for the same reason
Reconstructive plastic surgery can include finding and isolating many blood vessels both on the donor site and the receiving site, and this is quite time consuming.
In neurosurgery it is imperial that there are no bleeding before closing the cranium, and you want to stop bleeding without harming the brain.
Surgery after major trauma can take a long time since you have to find all the damage to different parts of the body, and try to repair it.
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