Outpatient Surgery Magazine - Subscribers

Difficult Airways - April 2015 - Outpatient Surgery Magazine

Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.

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Tall Tales From the OR If you stick around surgery long enough, you'll see it all. J ust when I thought I'd seen it all, another hard-to-believe moment manifests in the OR. The wisdom of experience mere- ly means that I have personally encountered nearly everything that can go wrong in surgery. Here's just a sampling of the memory menu of the last 24 years of surgical bliss, all based on true events I wouldn't believe unless I'd been there to witness them. • Sterility maelstrom. Years ago I was doing a shoulder arthroscopy when halfway through the procedure the nurse informed me that my instruments were not sterile. Turns out that somebody "misinterpret- ed" the autoclave indicator — the scope set was washed but never sterilized. Ow!!! I promptly stopped the case, irrigated the shoulder thoroughly, lit 3 candles at church and placed the patient on antibi- otics for several days. Thankfully no infection manifested and I was able to convince the patient to return to the OR to have her procedure completed. My gastric secretions (and coronaries) have never been the same. • Graft trouble. Once during an ACL reconstruction, after carefully C U T T I N G R E M A R K S John D. Kelly IV, MD 1 4 5 A P R I L 2 0 1 5 | O U T P AT I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E O N L I N E They used crotchet hooks in the pioneer days of shoulder arthroscopy to retrieve sutures. Thank heavens there was one on the set — undoubtedly purchased before the scrub nurse was born.

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