One Surgery, Two Surgery, Three Surgery, FLOOR!

The Day I Nearly Fainted in Surgery

During my extra-mural week in small animal clinics (I got to do surgery! Yes!) I bugged Dr Aaron to let me scrub in on an exploratory laparotomy ("We don't know what's wrong with your dog, maybe if we open him up we'll find something...") or some other similar abdominal surgery, I forget. As you will see, forgetting will be a common line in this thread.

That morning I had forgotten to eat anything substantial at all, the only sustanance was probably a quickie swill of good ol' H2O from my trusty non-spill coffee mug. Therein lay the major problem, hypoglycaemia. Sometimes when there is a lot of work to do in the clinic I just delay eating as long as I possibly can until theres a lull where I feel safe enough to duck out and nuke my food in the same microwave they use to heat up the dog food. Sad but true. But I cover my food!

Come 3PM and I still hadn't eaten anything and the dog went into surgery. And I wasn't one to miss out on a surgery I could scrub into! So I scrubbed in. Wasn't feeling at all faint, I sort of get an adrenaline rush during surgery. Ha ha.

Didn't find anything interesting inside the abdomen, so while Dr Aaron was closing up the dog, he decided to point out something to me and asked me what it was. My mind was drawing a half blank: "It's a ligament?"

Dr Aaron: "Yes, now Dr Sharon, what ligament is it?" (The surgeons all call each other doctor more for the fun of it than anything else.)

I was getting a bit more stressed as I thought I had learnt this before, I wanted to say "falciform ligament" on the tip of my tongue but on further thought didn't seem to be correct as it normally lay just inside the abdomen, not nearer the surface.

Then Dr Mark tried to further the interrogation and said :" It's starts with a P..."

Still drawing a blank, Dr Aaron said:" It's on Dr Mark's side and pointing to him!"

Looking down I saw the dog's penis and said apprehensively :" The penile ligament?"

Dr Mark took a set of haemostats ("clamps") and waved it around the end part of the penis to help me. Dr Aaron said :" It's staring you in the face!"

At that point I felt lightheaded and mumbled :" I need food..." and as an instinctive survival mechanism started to curl my head lower than my chest, still keeping sterile what I needed to keep sterile!

Dr Aaron finally noticed something amiss :" Do you need to lie down?"

I managed to muster up a :" Yes..." as much as I didn't want to leave, the only other option was fainting into a sterile field.

As Carrie the theatre nurse quickly helped me out of my gown, gloves, hat and mask Dr Mark went:" It's the preputial ligament!" just as I managed to stumble out into the prep room and said hello to the floor just moments before I would actually have fainted.

I will now never forget that the white line near the penis is the preputial ligament. = )