The Curious Scalpel

Surgery has always been and will always be first and foremost about anatomy.  This week, as part of our summer anatomy series during residency, I had the unique opportunity to fully dissect two cadaveric human upper extremities. I spent about 9 or 10 hours in there total finding arteries, tendons, ligaments, and of course bones. It's been a long while since I've spent anywhere near that amount of time in an anatomy lab, but it felt sort of good to be back. In fact, I appreciated it much more this time around than when I was a first-year medical student who knew next to nothing about surgical technique or anatomy.  Back in medical school, I was just following the prescribed anatomical dissections in the book (when I could, anyway) and not looking for anything in particular. "Oh, look, there's another vein... that I mistakenly cut through. Wonder if they'll tag it on the practical? Hope I don't fail."  It was a lot like scuba diving, as described by ...

Updates: 1) I'm currently a third year resident.  2) I still love what I do.  3) I'm planning on going into Hand surgery. Anyway, I thought about this blog for the first time in a long time today, and here's what reminded me of it: I was on the phone with my father, telling him what cases I had done today (which has become a pretty regular occurrence now). I mentioned the bigger cases of the day -  femur fracture, hip fractures, and even some hand cases. Then, almost as an afterthought, I mentioned the relatively uneventful case (in my opinion, anyway) which was an exploration of a forearm laceration.  Warning, gore ahead: The patient had sustained a cut to their forearm which nicked an artery. This means the blood was pumping out rather briskly, and so she was brought to the OR for exploration. We washed it out and found the source of the bleeding, which was a partially cut radial artery.  The hand has dual vascularization, one arterial source bein...