My First Surgical Experience

Well it really depends on what you consider ‘surgical experience’. I’ve been into the OR with my dad heaps of times to watch all sorts of surgeries. A kind orthopaedic surgeon let me scrub in on a ‘below knee amputation’ and watch a total knee replacement, I’ve stood for hours watching a complicated laparoscopic cholecystectomy on a screen, witnessed multiple caesarean sections and a Wertheim’s procedure.

They were mostly passive experiences, except for the amputation, in which, I got to cut the sural nerve – wow. The first time I saw a disarticulation procedure, I actually felt ‘upset’ because the poor man lost a toe: the surgeon reminded me that it would be his life that he lost if the toe wasn’t removed, the gangrenous toe would’ve caused sepsis and killed him. It has been a few years since that diabetic lost his toe and I’m in medical school now – with my first ever real surgical experience.

This experience I consider my first because I had the honour of giving the local anaesthetic, incising, removing and stitching up the patient (or you might think in my case, the victim). The whole shebang! I was on a medical mission trip in a rural province of China and I helped out in many minor surgical procedures for 2 days before the plastic surgeon asked me to do one myself.

It was a simple lipoma, roughly 2cm in diameter. He used a surgical pen and marked out the areas for me and stood by to watch me do the rest. He was there throughout the entire 5 minutes; which really felt like half an hour at that time. I administered the lignocaine and made the incision. The first incision was not deep enough and I had to deepen it. Using forceps to go around the lipoma, I had to clip the ‘vessel’ that supplied it that was deep to the tumour. Then I removed the mass and did a ‘mattress stitch’ which was only shown to me once before I attempted it. After that was all done, I closed up the wound.

The commendation from that surgeon was just one of the things that made me ecstatic. It was the first time I cut into a living person’s flesh for therapeutic reasons – I probably did accidentally cut a sibling or myself before. I ‘flew solo’. How many medical students, just out of first year, would get that chance? Not many I assume.

It might have seemed unethical initially and I quickly relayed this concern to the senior doctors present. They did not seem to have any qualms about it because there was a supervising consultant around and these people were too poor to pay for surgery. I feel that I could have at least told him that I was a very junior medical student and had no prior experience. The prick of the conscience soon faded and it was back to helping clean equipment and dress wounds for the surgeons.

I learnt a lot that trip and I would jump on the next chance to volunteer for that again. This event, together with all the other exposure to the surgical discipline I’ve had, has strongly boosted my interest in surgery. But for now, it is just concentrating on my studies as a 2nd year medical student that matters most.