Transplant Surgery

Well, I'm back for a post. We'll see how long this last.

This blog lasted throughout the majority of my intern year and a brief one month period during my third year. Now I'm about 1+ month through my fourth year of training. I started the year on transplant surgery, which is a cool specialty. We basically do two operations: liver transplants and kidney transplants. Kidney transplants are more frequent and are pretty straightforward in terms of the operation itself and the post-op recovery. The liver transplants are less frequent, are almost epic in their scope and post-op recovery.

On Thursday, I came into work a little early. I got paged at around 5 AM that a patient who we were following (on the waiting list for a combined liver-kidney transplant) was in the ER with an incarcerated hernia. I showed up to the hospital at 5:45 AM and scrubbed into the case. We had two scheduled cases that day, a laparoscopic cholecystectomy and a revision of dialysis fistula which I did next. During these cases, I found out that we were posting both a kidney and a liver transplant. We did the kidney transplant and next the liver transplant.

In summary, I scrubbed into a case at 6 AM and didn't finish with surgeries until 7 AM THE NEXT DAY. 25 hours of surgery! I was a little tired during the liver surgery, which was the last one. I was scrubbed in the 2nd assistant position and I actually did a lot from that position as there is a new fellow who is sort-of new at the transplant business, but there were parts of the surgery where I wasn't doing much and I FELL ASLEEP STANDING UP. However, at the end of the day, it was a pretty amazing day of surgery.