I’m not a surgeon (medical scientist), but one interesting thing is that the Skene’s and Bartholin’s glands (female lubrication glands) are both named after men, so modern anatomical education is encouraging people to call them paraurethral and vestibular glands instead.
Can a surgeon tell me what it’s like to do a hysterectomy, like from a technical standpoint! I wanna know what those baby makin parts are like when you pull em out!
Not a surgeon but I’ve scrubbed into abdominal surgery before to hold organs out of the way. With intestines, you can basically pull them out, then plop em back in and they just…. kinda sort themselves out. You can also feel peristalsis if you’re holding them.
Peeling a cyst out of an ovary with your hand is super satisfying. Better than peeling the protective clear plastic off of your new TV screen. But we don’t take out cysts through a big incision hardly ever anymore, it’s all laparoscopic for the most part now, so I don’t get to do it much.
I don’t work in the OR, but I used to do wound care.
Certain kinds of chronic wounds may be wider and/or deeper than the opening in the skin would lead you to believe.
When caring for them the wounds need to be measured by length, width, and depth. They are also assessed for being undermined (think about running your tongue between your teeth and lips) or tunneled (purse your lips and stick your tongue out). This is often done with a gloved finger.
The feeling of putting part of your hand inside a human that way, and feeling the warmth is, to me, unpleasant. I don’t know how surgeons become accustomed to it.
Exposed bone that’s being eaten away feels like rough concrete. Healthy periosteum (bones exterior and joint cartilage is smooth and slick.
Brain doesn’t hurt. During awake craniotomies once the bone is off and the outermost protective layer (duramater) of the brain is open, there’s no pain.
Also, healthy brain has the consistency of fatty jello that was taken out of the fridge an hour too early and hasn’t fully set yet.
Surgical nurse. Sometimes when babies are really wedged into the pelvis I have to go up through the vagina to push the baby back in. At the same time, the surgeon is going into the C-section incision with their hand to pull the baby’s head out. It gives me the heebie jeebies when our fingers meet inside from two separate holes.
Dentist here. I still find great satisfaction when the last periodontal ligament fiber breaks while pulling a tooth. Holding the tooth in your forceps and looking into a clean boney socket 😌
Imagine taking out an ingrown hair, or finally popping that pimple. But so much better.
Thin patients almost always do better surgically as less intra abdominal fat makes the surgery more precise and nothing beats precision when it comes to surgery. The few times I’ve operated on marathon runners… it was absolute bliss
Holding a beating heart is continually the most humbling and incredible feeling. Really makes you appreciate the spontaneity, strength, and fragility of life. This muscle is just banging away under your palm for no apparent reason, keeping time all on its own. And even though it kinda feels like a fish just consistently/steadily flapping its tail in your hand, it represents this person’s whole life and is strong enough to handle decades of high blood pressure, fat, sugar, exercise, fear, love, and all the other things you throw at it.
Also lungs are kinda squishy when they’re inflated, like a thicker wet balloon, but are really mushy and very slightly sticky when they’re deflated, like an airy playdoh or unbaked focaccia dough.
I can keep going/ask me anything, surgery is magical to me
Not a surgeon, but humans can roll their eyes (no not pitch your eyes, rotate about the iris). The muscles for this are essentially vestigial, since we evolved from prey animals with eyes on the sides of the head—meaning they needed to roll to focus when the head moves up and down. To this day, if we tilt our head up and down, our eyes “roll” slightly in response. There are very creepy videos of this with head mounted cameras on YouTube.
Surgery nurse here, ortho.
I did ortho oncology for years. Bone tumors that were always positively malignant looked scaled, like fatty fish skin.
Also, for kids, when doing a femur-tibial replacement, it seems to disrupt the growth rates and their affected foot grows at a much slower rate than the other, if not stopping entirely. They’d have 2 different sized feet moving forward.
During knee replacement they completely dislocate your knee, put the knee cap to the side, and start measuring and cutting. During tibia replacement part assists help push the tibia forward so you can apply components accurately.
During hip replacement the entire hip is dislocated, and if it’s old posterior approach, your femoral head is sticking out of the wound at like 45 degrees, roughly.
When you get a joint replacement revision, all bets are off. Freaking forget it. There is so much pulling, hammering, drilling. If it’s a hip you can lose so much blood you need a transfusion.
During abdominal surgery if you are reconnecting a patient’s colon, the surgeon will stick a special instrument up your butt to staple the rectum to the intestine. Yes staple.
When operating on a living person, spinal nerves look (and act) just like spaghetti. Have to use a smaller suction and be careful or else you’ll slurp them up and it gets annoying to try to not continuously capture them in your suction.
Not a surgeon, but a pathologists’ assistant. A fair number of people have splenules or “baby spleens”. They can be congenital, or become established after trauma.
A colostomy is when the intestines are hooked to an open port on the skin, bypassing some portion of the lower digestive tract. There’s a lot of reasons this might need to be done, and for shorter or longer durations.
Some people have colostomy bags for years, and this is where things can get very interesting. You see, your rectum produces mucus to help smooth your movements along. Even if there’s no passengers on the train, your body keeps greasing those tracks (I don’t know anything about trains).
And since there’s nothing to move the mucus, it just kinda hangs out. Sometimes for years. Sometimes for decades.
And in that time, it becomes something like a human pearl. By roughly the same mechanisms that pearls are formed in oysters. They can be very uncomfortable for patients depending on their size and location, its not a super uncommon problem and its fixable.
I’ve seen two that were roughly the size of baseballs. Those two flew completely under the radar until we tried to hook the plumbing back up, no pain or discomfort.
One of them I saw cut open, it looked like a jawbreaker with layer upon layer of what in the fuck. They’re dense, hefty, with a little give near the skin.
During organ transplantation, when a donor liver or kidney is totally hooked up, it starts filtering immediately. The more waste that needs to be cleared, the faster the urine or bile comes out.
Obligatory, not a surgeon, but I spent 6 years as a scrub nurse on the OT, and I have a 15+ year career as a senior RN. I have seen and worked in most specialised areas.
I am constantly amazed by how tough the human body actually it. The body can take way more abuse and neglect than you think it can. Things that you’d be absolutely certain would kill a person can be recovered from.
But don’t fuck with the delicate balance of electrolytes. You can rip off every limb, break every bone, rip out or shoot holes through most organs (so long as you stop the bleeding in time), there are even guidelines on how to, over several hours, do CPR on a person who has not had a heart beat for the best part of an hour due to extreme hypothermia, I’ve even seen an abdominal aorta accidentally cut clean in half and the person lived. But take a bit too much potassium, and you’re a goner.
Comments
I’m not a surgeon (medical scientist), but one interesting thing is that the Skene’s and Bartholin’s glands (female lubrication glands) are both named after men, so modern anatomical education is encouraging people to call them paraurethral and vestibular glands instead.
When you palpate the liver with your hand it feels . . . really nice. Smooth, slippery, and a perfect consistency.
How many surgeons are on Reddit? They’re sleeping or working.
Not a surgeon but when you have an autopsy your tongue is pulled backward and out your chest through your Y incision.
Can a surgeon tell me what it’s like to do a hysterectomy, like from a technical standpoint! I wanna know what those baby makin parts are like when you pull em out!
Not a surgeon but I’ve scrubbed into abdominal surgery before to hold organs out of the way. With intestines, you can basically pull them out, then plop em back in and they just…. kinda sort themselves out. You can also feel peristalsis if you’re holding them.
Peeling a cyst out of an ovary with your hand is super satisfying. Better than peeling the protective clear plastic off of your new TV screen. But we don’t take out cysts through a big incision hardly ever anymore, it’s all laparoscopic for the most part now, so I don’t get to do it much.
Edit: corrected a spelling mistake
Nurse here.
I don’t work in the OR, but I used to do wound care.
Certain kinds of chronic wounds may be wider and/or deeper than the opening in the skin would lead you to believe.
When caring for them the wounds need to be measured by length, width, and depth. They are also assessed for being undermined (think about running your tongue between your teeth and lips) or tunneled (purse your lips and stick your tongue out). This is often done with a gloved finger.
The feeling of putting part of your hand inside a human that way, and feeling the warmth is, to me, unpleasant. I don’t know how surgeons become accustomed to it.
Exposed bone that’s being eaten away feels like rough concrete. Healthy periosteum (bones exterior and joint cartilage is smooth and slick.
Baby livers feel like tofu
Serial killers will blend in well here
Brain doesn’t hurt. During awake craniotomies once the bone is off and the outermost protective layer (duramater) of the brain is open, there’s no pain.
Also, healthy brain has the consistency of fatty jello that was taken out of the fridge an hour too early and hasn’t fully set yet.
I want to know why no one prepares you for the gas you experience with abdominal surgery. It truly sucks.
Surgical nurse. Sometimes when babies are really wedged into the pelvis I have to go up through the vagina to push the baby back in. At the same time, the surgeon is going into the C-section incision with their hand to pull the baby’s head out. It gives me the heebie jeebies when our fingers meet inside from two separate holes.
Dentist here. I still find great satisfaction when the last periodontal ligament fiber breaks while pulling a tooth. Holding the tooth in your forceps and looking into a clean boney socket 😌
Imagine taking out an ingrown hair, or finally popping that pimple. But so much better.
Thin patients almost always do better surgically as less intra abdominal fat makes the surgery more precise and nothing beats precision when it comes to surgery. The few times I’ve operated on marathon runners… it was absolute bliss
Holding a beating heart is continually the most humbling and incredible feeling. Really makes you appreciate the spontaneity, strength, and fragility of life. This muscle is just banging away under your palm for no apparent reason, keeping time all on its own. And even though it kinda feels like a fish just consistently/steadily flapping its tail in your hand, it represents this person’s whole life and is strong enough to handle decades of high blood pressure, fat, sugar, exercise, fear, love, and all the other things you throw at it.
Also lungs are kinda squishy when they’re inflated, like a thicker wet balloon, but are really mushy and very slightly sticky when they’re deflated, like an airy playdoh or unbaked focaccia dough.
I can keep going/ask me anything, surgery is magical to me
Edit: typo fix
Edit 2: omg thank you so much for the award
Not a surgeon, but humans can roll their eyes (no not pitch your eyes, rotate about the iris). The muscles for this are essentially vestigial, since we evolved from prey animals with eyes on the sides of the head—meaning they needed to roll to focus when the head moves up and down. To this day, if we tilt our head up and down, our eyes “roll” slightly in response. There are very creepy videos of this with head mounted cameras on YouTube.
Surgery nurse here, ortho.
I did ortho oncology for years. Bone tumors that were always positively malignant looked scaled, like fatty fish skin.
Also, for kids, when doing a femur-tibial replacement, it seems to disrupt the growth rates and their affected foot grows at a much slower rate than the other, if not stopping entirely. They’d have 2 different sized feet moving forward.
During knee replacement they completely dislocate your knee, put the knee cap to the side, and start measuring and cutting. During tibia replacement part assists help push the tibia forward so you can apply components accurately.
During hip replacement the entire hip is dislocated, and if it’s old posterior approach, your femoral head is sticking out of the wound at like 45 degrees, roughly.
When you get a joint replacement revision, all bets are off. Freaking forget it. There is so much pulling, hammering, drilling. If it’s a hip you can lose so much blood you need a transfusion.
During abdominal surgery if you are reconnecting a patient’s colon, the surgeon will stick a special instrument up your butt to staple the rectum to the intestine. Yes staple.
As a surgical tech, I’ve had to nudge students awake that we’re assisting in surgery.
When operating on a living person, spinal nerves look (and act) just like spaghetti. Have to use a smaller suction and be careful or else you’ll slurp them up and it gets annoying to try to not continuously capture them in your suction.
Not a surgeon, but a pathologists’ assistant. A fair number of people have splenules or “baby spleens”. They can be congenital, or become established after trauma.
There aren’t many occasions I get to share this.
A colostomy is when the intestines are hooked to an open port on the skin, bypassing some portion of the lower digestive tract. There’s a lot of reasons this might need to be done, and for shorter or longer durations.
Some people have colostomy bags for years, and this is where things can get very interesting. You see, your rectum produces mucus to help smooth your movements along. Even if there’s no passengers on the train, your body keeps greasing those tracks (I don’t know anything about trains).
And since there’s nothing to move the mucus, it just kinda hangs out. Sometimes for years. Sometimes for decades.
And in that time, it becomes something like a human pearl. By roughly the same mechanisms that pearls are formed in oysters. They can be very uncomfortable for patients depending on their size and location, its not a super uncommon problem and its fixable.
I’ve seen two that were roughly the size of baseballs. Those two flew completely under the radar until we tried to hook the plumbing back up, no pain or discomfort.
One of them I saw cut open, it looked like a jawbreaker with layer upon layer of what in the fuck. They’re dense, hefty, with a little give near the skin.
So yeah, humans can make pearls.
During organ transplantation, when a donor liver or kidney is totally hooked up, it starts filtering immediately. The more waste that needs to be cleared, the faster the urine or bile comes out.
Obligatory, not a surgeon, but I spent 6 years as a scrub nurse on the OT, and I have a 15+ year career as a senior RN. I have seen and worked in most specialised areas.
I am constantly amazed by how tough the human body actually it. The body can take way more abuse and neglect than you think it can. Things that you’d be absolutely certain would kill a person can be recovered from.
But don’t fuck with the delicate balance of electrolytes. You can rip off every limb, break every bone, rip out or shoot holes through most organs (so long as you stop the bleeding in time), there are even guidelines on how to, over several hours, do CPR on a person who has not had a heart beat for the best part of an hour due to extreme hypothermia, I’ve even seen an abdominal aorta accidentally cut clean in half and the person lived. But take a bit too much potassium, and you’re a goner.