Heart Surgery (Post 2)

Heart Surgery is freaking awesome. When I was sent there I was just told to change and then just go in. I walk into the room and one of the techs tells me to go watch. No introduction, no preamble, nothing. Just, "Go and look." After just having spent a week in a mini operation room and nearly passing out a few times, I was a little worried about seeing an open chest cavity. And when I'm watching, I stand right at the patient's head, surrounded by important tubes such as the ones that let them breathe or keep them asleep. These are tubes that need to stay connected. If I faint and fall into these things, I will kill the person. And not like, they'll be messed up, they will actually die. This thought stays with me as I approach the operating table. As I get my first view of an open chest, I'm completely fine. I don't feel like I'm going to faint at all. This is a good feeling because I don't know the penalty for accidental murder in Sri Lanka. I'm guessing it involves tying parts of my body to different elephants and then releasing 3 lions onto the scene. It's also probably televised.

Pretty much, this past week I've been watching various heart surgeries and talking to doctors that are performing heart surgery. I feel like I shouldn't be distracting them, but they like talking, so it's all good. To get to the heart, first, you have to cut through your chest skin. this is done with a scalpel at first. It is then continued with a cauterizing knife. While this is going on, all you can smell is burning flesh. It smells like meat mixed with rubber. After you get through the skin and fat (they're having heart surgery, even here it's still mostly fat people) you need to get through the sternum. What would you use to accomplish that? I think I'd go for the handheld saw and cut the bone in half. They have this little saw that quite easily gets through the sternum, but thankfully it's pretty quiet, so you can hear the bone being cut. After that it's more cauterizing. This time to the sides of the cut sternum and surrounding tissue. And, I kid you not, it smells like ribs you'd order at Damons. I'm watching this guy's chest get cut open, all I can think about is barbecue sauce.

The heart itself is kinda red and has some yellow because of the fat. I really think I'm going to do more cardio when I get home. It looks only kinda like it does in anatomy books, and the veins and arteries aren't colored blue and red respectively. Lying books. It looks really cool to see a beating heart. And it's weird because I could actually reach out and touch it if I wanted to. I do, but since I'm not sterile, that would be way #2 I could kill the patient. After getting to the heart they have to attach all these tubes so the blood can go to a bypass machine so the heart can stop beating. In case you didn't already assume, when you cut into an atrium, blood spurts out. Randomly when they're finishing up, one of the sutures won't be tight enough and a little fountain of blood will start to rise. The surgeon usually just puts his finger on it like it's a Pepsi bottle that's leaking. Sometimes the surgeon will get a facefull of blood. There really is blood everywhere.

For cardiac artery bypass surgery, they take a huge vein out of the person's leg from their ankle to their knee and then graft it onto the heart and aorta. For valve replacements, they just cut out the old ones and then sew the new one in. It's not exactly that easy, and the surgeries take about 4 or 5 hours, but that's pretty much how it's done.

There was a lady today that weighed 85 kg. If you convert that to pounds it comes out to "Too Much". So she needed a new valve. Also a diet. After the doctors got through all the fat and finally go to the heart, it was ridiculous. It was like the scene when the Grinch is finally filled with the spirit of Christmas when he hears all the Whos down in Whoville singing. Operating on her enormous yellow heart was harder than usual and when they got done, she was fibrillating, so they got out the little heart paddles and shocked her 3 times before the heart stopped that. A little later the surgeon was sewing the atrium back together and his head and arms just kinda dropped in defeated disappointment because the ventricle was fibrillating again. He got back out the paddles and shocked her again. Later, he rolled his eyes at a tube because it sprayed blood all over his chest and face. I left after they had to put her on an external pacemaker because her heart wouldn't go back to normal. Honestly, her ECG looked like an earthquake. *Insert your own fat person walking joke here*

Heart surgery is pretty sweet, but you know what's even better? And by 'even better' I mean, 'better than Green Bay'. The Dallas Cowboys.

-Kurt