Day 5,6

For these days I have been shadowing in the vascular surgery department at Barnes in conjunction with the WashU med school.  I have thoroughly enjoyed it so far as I have always been super interested in the human anatomy and how to fix it when things go wrong as it can be both complex and quite simple.   I am shadowing through a connection to the chief of the department, Dr. Sanchez.

Day 5: it was a pretty straight forward day, I was not with Dr. Sanchez but with one of his associates, Dr. Ohman and a senior fellow, Thomas.   They performed the longest procedure that I have observed that lasted seven straight hours.  The procedure was an angiovac, which is where they make small incisions just above the knees and below the neck on either side where they put in tubing to create a synthetic new pathway for the blood as they close off arteries on either side.   They then take a wire with a small plastic hook on the end and insert it into the veins through the incisions, and use the hook to break up blood clots within the artery.  This took a good deal of time as the amount that this man had was massive, filling up six filters and part of a small bowl.

Day 6: I got to start off the day with an AKA which is an above the knee amputation.  This is the fastest surgery that I have seen so far and the most efficient.  It was forty minutes in and out, and it was a very weird experience.  There was a period of fifteen minutes that the leg was just chilling on the table to the side until a person from radiology came and picked it up.  I also observed a fistula procedure and that was very different in that it was very non invasive.  For the non invasive stuff we usually have to wear an additional 10-15 lbs. of lead to protect from the X-ray radiation as it is on for most of the procedure.

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