OT day

Today we had quite a few cases in the OT. My seniors have been relieved so iam kind of incharge of my unit. It is a little scary though, because quite a bit of the decision making depends on you. 

Even though my seniors have been relieved 3 months before their exams, they still have to come to the OT due to lack of hands.

                                 I was involved in two cases today, one was a Bilateral AVN case. AVN (Avascular Necrosis of the femoral head) is lack of blood supply to the femoral head. it occurs due to various resasons, in our case it was due to chronic intake of steroids for his asthma. Anyways he had it in both his hips, left being worse than right. We first wanted to tackle the better hip so that the disease process can be arrested earlier and we can give him a biologic hip. We did an indigineous procedure known as Bakshi s procedure developed by an indian surgeon in the 1980s. It involves making a small trough in the femoral neck followed by placing a muscle pedicle graft and holding it in place with a screw. the procedure went on quite well without any complications. This was the first time i was assisting this kind of a procedure, so it was fun.

                                  The second case was a an old elbow case ( distal humerus fracture) operated about a year back and the patient had now come back with implant failure. We faced some difficulty in the procedure though, due to severe fibrosis because of the previous operation. elbow is one region where there is a high chance of fibrosis post op. it takes quite an effort from the patient to get his elbow back to its original shape. anyways coming back to the case. it took quite a bit of time to isolate the ulnar nerve which is an essential step before proceeding to fix the fracture. There was a lot of fibrosis surrounding the nerve and because of the distorted anatomy it became even more difficult to identify it. But my prof did identify it and fixed the fracture with what is known as an reconstruction plate and screws. Eventually my junior and I closed up the case and had to rush for a seminar on " open fractures management" immediately. It was quite informative actually. 

                                  Quite an eventful day actually. learnt quite a bit today. and i hope to find some followers though and also i hope to put up posts on a more regular basis.:)

Sachin and Gregory House M D

Sachin Tendulkar evokes so many emotions in our minds, and i really cant believe that he wants to continue playing till 2011. That is incredible, but is he going to last that long. Dont get me wrong, i would still love to watch him play, and the kind of response he generates is quite amazing. But he is not the same anymore, he is not as prolific. And as i read in the newspapers a few days back, the indian government does not want to risk the tour of Pakistan, because so much as a scratch on a player like tendulkar may cause an outright war.... It is ridiculous to think about it, but it might be true... Most of Indians for the past two decades have been brought up on Tendulkar's cover drives... It would be difficult to imagine cricket without him... But any ways enough about Sachin...

There were two things I watched over the last coup0le of days, one was the match of course and second was a TV serial House MD, which i guess most of you would have watched or atleast heard of.. The story, characters, setting everything is plain stupid, but still fun to watch... Most of their diagnosis are exotic.. I saw about 24 episodes from season three, 24 different diseases, we probably will not diagnose even one of them in our life time here... Atleast in a government setup, we dont even have ten percent of the investigations that they do in a western setup...

The lead actor Dr. Greogory House is an amazing character though... I think at some level all of us do relate to him though... I kind of find similarities in his attitude towards patients... we call it empathy here... lot of my colleagues here accuse me of the same thing.. i am trying to change though...:) But as i said all of us do relate to him in some way or the other...

My first entry

Hi,

 This is my first entry... I am a very lazy guy... having heard about blogs and having read a lot of them, I finally decided to take the plunge... I am Med student doing my post graduation in orthopedics... into my second year now and with alot of free time now...:) 

I am in this place called Hubli, which is in the northern half of Karnataka (which of course is a state in India)...

I hope i blog once in a while atleast...