When you go to your acute care affiliation, students always talk about watching his/her first surgery. You read on facebook, 'Going to watch my first surgery!!' with a selfie in his/her operating room scrubs. After watching a partial knee arthroplasty and total hip replacement, I learned a lot about my role to the patient. Besides being a very cool experience, there are other benefiting factors of watching surgery:
1) PTs treat these patients after he/she is all stitched up. Good to know what is going on inside! Once you see the metal implanted, you can almost imagine how its rolling and gliding in the joint when treating. OHHhh and to watch the surgeons' meticulously rip off each osteophyte that could potentially irritate the patient! That doctor just saved that patient some potential pain.
2) That's a lot of stitches. Patients always fear that they will bust a stitch like busting a seam in a really tight pair of pants. I assured them that the doctors carefully stitched up SO many layers, it would be really hard to bust a stitch as long as he/she is following the prescribed precautions.
3) More compassion! OUCH! Best not to describe the gory process of slicing through several layers of skin, fascia, muscle then buzz-sawing the bones to patients. But shit, that is definitely more than a paper cut. I definitely had more compassion when I was treating these patients [and for my stepmom that had her knee replaced at 70 years of age].
Picture from healthpages.org.
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