6/25/14
Today we just did rounds in the male surgical ward with Dr. Rahib. Most of the cases were post-op abdominal or fracture surgeries. As we saw each of the patients we learned about the different methods for fixing fractures and the importance of immobilizing the joints above and below the break. It was really interesting, but the methods of realigning the bones using weights attached to the casts or screwed into the bones themselves would never be used in the US... or at least I am not aware of this. Dr. Rahib also gave us a lecture on the appendix before we took a break for lunch.
When walking outside through the hospital after coming back from lunch, my friend and I randomly ran into Dr. Ombati, who excitedly told us to get scrubbed in because there was going to be an amputation in the surgery building. We had previously seen this patient on Monday during rounds. The patient was a 28 year old female with type 1 diabetes who had burned the top of her left foot. This burn had become infected and since she was not taking her insulin, the condition had worsened drastically. The week before, Dr. Ombati did a minor surgery to clean the wound, but ended up removing lots of dead tissue and realizing her foot and leg were consumed by gangrene. Today they had to perform and above the knee amputation because the woman had refused the surgery for so long that it had spread from her foot up her leg. After lots of counseling, the doctors had finally persuaded her that she needed to have the surgery in order to live.
The surgery went very smoothly, taking exactly 50 minutes. No description can really do justice to how incredible it was to see someone's leg being cut off... not that it is a good thing, but it was incredible to be standing right next to the surgeons and taking videos of the whole thing... I never imagined that happening for a long time.
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