A very strange thing occurred last night, at least I thought it was strange.
I was watching a TV documentary called Surgeons At The Edge Of Life, which deals with the most incredible surgery imaginable. Brain tumors, Heart-lung transplant, 50kg life saving apronectomy, even a complete aorta replaced with a synthetic one that a woman had knitted earlier.
I'm telling you, it's jaw dropping stuff.
This week's episode was called Every Second Counts. It was about emergency trauma surgery. One patient was a woman with a bleed on her brain because of a head injury, they estimated a window of 10 minutes to get her anaesthetised, prepped and remove a fist-sized section of skull to give her a chance of surviving without serious brain damage. They did it in ~7mins.
The next patient was a bloke, (Steve) of about my age who was admitted following a motorcycle accident. He had badly dislocated one arm and completely shattered the other, added to this he had extensive abrasions some internal bleeding.
The bleeding was the big concern. The usual think would be to open the patent up and have a look see, but this guy's medical history said he had had a liver transplant, a pancreas transplant and was on a heavy dose of warfarin. It was decided that operating would be too risky.
The bleeding got worse and the surgeon decided that he didn't have much chance either way, but that operating was the marginally better option.
The operation was unbelievable, they opened him up breast bone to crotch and moved his vitals around like they were in a butchers shop,then they stuffed him full of sterile tea-towels and he stopped bleeding.
Some days later he was stable enough th have his arms repaired.
Some weeks later we get to see Steve again, he is recovering slowly.
"It's funny" He says in a Brummie accent, "I was only doing 40 or 50, I've come off at 100 and done less damage".
I looked at his face and realised that I knew him.
The odd one or two of you, especially the older ones, just might know him too.
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