November 22nd, 2011 by RamonaBatesMD in True Stories
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A month ago during a storm with significant straight line winds we had a tree near the house loss it’s top half.
Upon inspection, it turned out the pine tree was infested with pine beetles. We were encouraged to burn the debris to help protect the other trees from the beetles.
This past week my husband cut up the felled tree (we still need to get a tree cutter out to cut down the 2/3s of the tree still standing) and carried it to an area of the front property. Yesterday morning after a light rain, he decided it was a good time to set it afire and burn it. Note the red container under the tree to the left. It contains gasoline. [Even though he told me he wouldn’t use an accelerant.] He did run a water hose down from the house which is barely visible in the forefront of the photo.
Medscape has a really nice article with video by Kenneth L. Silverstein, MD; Stephanie Josephon — Surgical Fires: How They Start and How to Prevent Them: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Suture for a Living*
November 11th, 2011 by BruceCampbellMD in True Stories
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Traveling makes one modest – you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
-Gustave Flaubert
We have come to Kenya, expecting to work outside of our “comfort zones.”
Our patient has arrived from miles away, riding on the back of her husband’s bicycle. She has an enlarging, bleeding mass growing off of the side of her neck. There are no pathologists available, so we are uncertain what kind of tumor it is, although it appears to be a cancer. She has been wearing a scarf to hide the mass for the past year; her head covering is speckled with blood.
We are anxious. Unexpected things can happen in an operating room this far from home. We expect Read more »
October 5th, 2011 by Felasfa Wodajo, M.D. in Opinion, Research
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As we discussed in the first of this two part series, mobile devices are already entering the world of the surgeon. Currently, it is mostly downloadable apps that promise to help surgeons with the informational portions of their tasks, such as tracking the cases they have done, e.g. Surgichart or helping in the consent process, e.g. Surgery Risk
While apps that are dedicated to the technical aspects of surgery, such as the excellent AO Surgery Reference, are becoming available, in the future we will see the iPad (or its brethren) actually in the operating room. Why ? Because the iPad has many characteristics that make it a great an advanced surgical instrument.
First is its small size. Every modern operating room has stacks of electronic equipment hanging from the ceiling or in large cabinets for patient monitoring and controlling in-field devices. Since the iPad already supports a bevy of standard wireless communication protocols, many of these large boxes’ functions could likely be off-loaded to an iPad with clever engineering. One immediate advantage would be that Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*
September 12th, 2011 by ChristopherChangMD in News
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Surgery is messy… and I don’t mean in terms of blood and guts…
What I mean are wires, cables, tubing, etc.
Electric cord for the operating tableLet’s take a routine tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy for example…
- Electric cord for the anesthesia machine
- Electric cord for the surgeon’s headlight
- Light cord from the surgeon’s headlight to the lightbox
- Breathing circuit tube from the patient to the anesthesia machine
- Carbon dioxide outflow tube from the patient to the anesthesia machine
- Suction tubing from the surgical table to the vacuum canister
- Vacuum cable from the vacuum canister to the wall socket
- Electrocautery cable (along with electric cord to power the machine)
- Coblation cable (along with electric cord to power the machine)
- IV fluids lines from patient to IV bags
- EKG lines
- Grounding pad cable
- All the wires and cables that go with running a computer
- etc. etc. etc. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Fauquier ENT Blog*
April 10th, 2011 by DrWes in Humor, True Stories
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He must have been about eight at the time. I had made the mistake of watching doctor shows on TV with him and he had probably heard my wife and I describe the challenges of my doctor lifestyle at times over dinner. For the most part, he seemed oblivious and liked the things that most young boys at that age do: sports, jungle gyms, mud, and bicycles, but he had never seen his Dad at work.
So the day came when my wife was doing errands and stopped by the hospital with the kids to drop off my pager which I had inadvertently left at home. As timing would have it, I had just scrubbed in a case, so she was kind enough to bring the pager to the electrophysiology lab control room where the technicians could retrieve it for me. My son, realizing how close he was to my workplace asked within earshot of the technician, “Mom, could I see?” She looked at the technician, and he nodded agreement. Cautiously, they entered the control room just to wave “hi” briefly through the glass. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Wes*
