having surgery?

If you’re planning to have surgery, have it in the morning.  A study shows that adverse events were most common when surgery started between 3pm and 4pm and least common between 9am and noon.  The good news is that these adverse events were mostly related to pain management and postoperative nausea and vomiting and for the most part, were not too dire.

Related posts:

1. there’s a surgery-phobic guy volunteering at the surgery labAs I've mentioned before, my experiments involve surgery to insert catheters into blood vessels to measure many different things.  So they take place at an animal surgery facility.  And lots of premeds volunteer at this facility.  For the most part, they tend to be your typical gung-ho, annoying premeds.  But once in awhile, there's one that just doesn't fit in.  I'll call him surgery-phobic guy.  I suspect that he's also people-phobic based on the way he interacts (or fails to) with me and the rest of the crew.  He comes in and proceeds to clean the entire building.  He wipes down counters, cleans the prep room, and even wipes down the doors to each room.  But he doesn't ever set foot in the operating room.  Every time I see him, I wonder why the hell he is volunteering at an animal SURGERY facility if he's afraid of surgery. Although there is a virtual army of undergrad volunteers in the morning, they tend to thin out by the latter half of the day.  And this facility is creepy as hell, even during the day because there's absolutely no one around.  It's dead silence except for the sound of the ventilator and the beeping of the pulse-ox.  Couple that with the fact that I've seen my fair share of weird shit happening with the animals (such as twitching, outright paw dancing, and jerking) and it makes for one very jumpy, freaked out me as I sit there all alone watching the animal...
2. no surgery, pleaseAfter much argument, my husband and I decided not to give in to mother-in-law’s antics this particular weekend. So we started off the day by heading over to the local Costco to load up on some food for my family. We were almost there when my husband’s cell phone rang. Me: Let me guess who it is. My husband glances at his phone and confirms that it’s his mom. He proceeds to pick up the phone as I roll my eyes, wondering what kind of excuse she’s going to give today to force us to waste the day in her most unpleasant company. I listen hard to try to understand the little snippets of Chinese that I’ve learned, but I cannot make out what the conversation was about, except for that something was wrong. My husband finally hung up the phone and told me what had happened: the mother-in-law had hurt her ankle while hiking and was now at the ER with her friend. Me: Well, she’ll have to wait forever there and there’s someone with her, so there’s no point in us being there too. We should just finish this up before heading over since we’re already almost here. Husband: Okay. Besides, she probably just sprained her ankle. Me: Yep. Well, we didn’t even make it to Costco before she called us again and demanded to talk to me. And I couldn’t understand much of what she said through her hysterics besides “get over here now.” After finally getting...
3. no surgery, please (part 2)So my husband and I (despite the fact that we were still exhausted from the previous day’s events) were obligated to return to the hospital the following day to check on mother-in-law, who was doing as well as could be expected given her fear that she was still going to die. We took some time out of our day there to visit my husband’s cousin, who had been admitted last night and who was only down the hall from my mother-in-law.  Typical teenager that he is, he merely laid there pretty much indifferent to the happenings around him (apparently for Chinese people, when someone ends up in the hospital for whatever reason, it is reason to have the entire extended family visit) playing with his Nintendo DS.  His mom was glad to see me because she wanted my medical opinion about her son’s case.  No amount of reasoning on my part was able to convince her of the fact that I am but merely a med student with very limited clinical experience who really has no place commenting on her son’s case. Apparently, my cousin-in-law had also fractured his tibia and fibula in his fall (though not as badly as my mother-in-law) and the orthopedic surgeon (the same one who treated my mother-in-law) also decided that surgery with insertion of plates was the best course of action for him.  However, this was not settling well with his family, but for a different reason. His mom explained to me that Chinese...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.