After a long day in Olympia this week, I came home and made some salsa and nachos (and by "made" I mean "opened the salsa jar and poured some into a bowl"), and decided to watch a bit of TV to unwind. Channel surfing didn't yield much that was interesting until the University of Washington channel caught my eye. I guess the med school there does video lectures, and the orthpaedic surgery department was presenting a seminar on shoulder reconstruction. The professor spoke (rather blandly) about the surgery itself (I guess a video lecture is still a lecture, and therefore, can be quite dry), but then indicated a that a video would be shown of the procedure being done on an actual patient. Sweet! So of course I watched it.
It was really cool. They showed all the incisions and explained what they were doing and why. There was a lot more drilling than I thought there would be, and also more, um, gushing, for lack of a better word. But it was still very cool. I saw the bones in the shoulder joint and how they fit together and rotate. I saw the layers of muscle carefully separated and later sewed back together such that the proper function and movement was retained (though I imagine the patient will be sore for a little while!). Definitely interesting stuff, and I couldn't help but be a in bit of awe of the precision and complexity of the surgery. It was kind of... elegant. I know that's a bit of a weird word to use here, but it was really neat to see.
At one point, I also realized that I was eating while watching surgery (and its inherent, um, mess), and that it didn't faze me. Part of thought that maybe that's weird, that you shouldn't be able to watch people be cut open while munching away on dinner.
It was then that I looked at my bowl of salsa and realized that it kind of looked like...
Never mind.
At least it wasn't spaghetti and meatballs.
1 comment:
I love it. You always know you are a true health professional when you can eat and talk about what you did that day. I know a few times Ryan has had to tell me to quit talking.
I only saw one orthopedic surgery in my nursing career and it reminded me too much of carpentry so I stayed far away from that unit.
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