While I was away from the internet world I’ve been busying myself with exams and also tons of surgeries. For those of you who don’t already know, we have to run a surgery each week. We do our pre-operative exams on Tuesdays and then perform the actual procedure on the animal on the following Thursday. This gives us enough time to see if our animals we picked are fit for surgery.
First Incision
This past week I was the head surgeon for our Gastropexy and Gastrotomy surgery. So here are some things I learned during this surgery.
- The ending “-pexy” means “adhesion” or “fastening to”. Since I performed a gastro-pexy in the procedure I had to adhere the stomach to another organ.
- The ending “-tomy” means to make an “incision of”. Gastro-tomy means that I would have to make an incision into the stomach. Basically for this procedure I punctured into the stomach and then just sutured it back together.
- When doing gastrotomy, try to incise in the hypovascular area of the stomach. You can use some stay sutures on both ends of the stomach to anchor them or have an assistant surgeon hold the stomach taut so you can incise precisely in this area. During my surgery I slipped a little bit with the scalpel and accidentally hit a blood vessel, so I had to ligate that and suture up the mistaken incision before doing it again. A stab incision is better for better accuracy.
- When closing the stomach after incision into the lumen, it’s better to use a 2 layer inverting suture. The 1st layer should include the submucosa, muscularis and serosal layer of the stomach in a simple continuous or Cushing suture pattern. The 2nd layer should include only the serosal and muscularis layers using a Cushing or Lembert suture.
- Always make sure there isn’t any dead space when closing up after a surgical procedure. We had a minor problem with some seroma and granulation tissue forming after my assistant surgeon closed up the wound. While it turned out to be okay and nothing dehisced, it still would have been better of course if that didn’t happen before. So keep this in mind if you ever do surgery!
Helping Belle suture the wound
Tonight, I just came back from doing another surgery which was Enterectomy and Anastomosis, as well as Jejunal-Feeding Tube placement and Enteropexy. It was a long lab… we got out an hour after lab was supposed to end. And when we left the place today, it was alright pitch dark and raining a lot. So it was a long day. And that’s why I’m just sitting here, vegging out and listening to some music. I haven’t been able to relax for awhile so I take every free minute I can to just sit and do just that. It’s very tiring. This whole semester is really tiring.
I won’t be able to rest for long though. In a bit I’ll have to tabulate all of the drugs in my pharmacological drug index and also go to bed since I have dute in UP Diliman (in Manila) tomorrow morning. Ugh, so much to do and so little time…
Anyway, I should really get on those things. I’ll catch up with you all soon. But have a great weekend!
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