When surgeons remove an internal organ - a lung, a kidney, part/all of the small or large intestine - and don’t replace it with a transplant, do the put some kind of filler in to take up the resulting void? Sawdust? Great Stuff? Play-Doh?
Do they let it fill with blood/plasma/saline? Or do they sew the patient up with a big bubble of air in there?
Most of your internal organs are somewhat mobile and flexible they’ll squish around to fill up gaps. My wife had direct experience with a chunk of intestine being removed, and I know that nothing was put in to fill up the space.
I don’t think they remove anything from a living person that is so large they need to pack in some kind of space filler, but I know we have some medical experts around who can say with more authority.
I’ve often wondered about this myself. Many years ago, my mother had the lower lobe of her right lung surgically removed. She was assured she would be left with nearly normal lung capacity and suffer no ill effects from missing a portion of her lung.
Au Contraire! She has been susceptible ever since to severe bronchitis and pneumonia, and you can hear the wheezing just by sitting next to her. Another doctor said much later that her lung has sagged into the empty space, stretching and thereby narrowing her bronchial passages. I’ve wondered in the years since if her problems couldn’t have been avoided by tossing a breast implant in that cavity before they sewed her up!
Am I the only one squicked out a little by “the brain’s natural juices”?
That’s what makes them so delicious.
Especially with fava beans and a nice Chianti
Brain juice is probably the 2nd most important juice in the body next to eyeball juice.
One of my immediate family members had a large pituitary tumor removed a few years ago. They removed tissue (fat?) from his leg and used it to fill in the empty space. The tumor was removed through his nose, so he has no visible scar on his head, but he has a decent sized scar on his thigh where they took the filler tissue out.
As part of the finish to the hysterectomy, they sucked out as much of the neutral gas as they could and injected saline, apparently it is to help the body ‘lubricate’ the tissues so they don’t create adhesions, and it absorbs gradually over a few weeks.
Since the doc had also repaired a whole bunch of adhesions left over from my reproductive organs misbehaving, it seems to have worked, though I do have a couple tiny adhesions left that I can feel if I move just wrong [but I had them before, so either he missed them/couldnt get to them or they grew back because it is sort of a predisposition for my innards to adhere there.]
Are you sure that was used to fill space? It could also have been a graft intended to prevent leakage of cerebrospinal fluid for example. I don’t know if that would be an issue with pituitary tumors.
“I had a tumor removed from my head. Here, let me show you the scar…”
Considering how much your stomach, intestines, and bladder change in volume just during the normal course of events of a single day, and how much the volume of adipose tissues in the waist can change during an adult lifetime, I think you’d need to remove a whole lot of something from those areas before worrying about the other organs not being able to adjust.
Much preferable to brains packed in light syrup.
I’ve taken out lots of internal parts, and I’ve never left permanent bulk filler material in place. That includes things from both the thoracic and abdominal cavities. There are some semi-exceptions, of course. In major trauma situations, one practices damage control surgery in which staged operations are expected: the first surgery stops the life-threatening bleeding; the patient goes to the ICU to get buffed up a bit; the patient returns to the OR to have secondary issues repaired, rinse and repeat. In those situations, it’s not unusual to leave bulky packing in place to help control bleeding, but the plan is to return in several hours to remove it.
If part of the diaphragm or pelvic floor or chest/abdominal wall has to be removed, then a barrier must be placed there to restore the integrity of the cavity. This isn’t really to replace bulk, though; it’s to prevent herniation from one space into another.
There’s a sort of internal apron of vascular fat called the omentum which is pretty mobile within the abdomen. The omentum tends to stick to areas of inflammation and ‘tries’ to seal them off from the rest of the abdominal cavity; kind of like that fix-a-flat goo that you squirt into a tire. It’s not unheard of for a surgeon to tack the omentum down in a trouble spot if it looks like it could use a little backup. This could be considered a bit of bulk addition, I suppose.
I know of cases in which orthopedists have had to remove an infected joint replacement, and have molded a wad of some kind of polymer cement infused with antibiotics and placed it in the resulting gap so as to keep the limb from shortening in the interval while the infection clears. Again, the plan was to remove this when the definitive procedure was completed.
There are also a number of products meant to stop bleeding from raw surfaces, like thrombin glue and thrombin/gelfoam, which are left in place and allowed to absorb over time, but they are not bulk agents per se.
I think they can, actually. Aren’t there fillers, basically sterile plastic blobs, put into place for things like kidnets and lungs?
When my prostate was removed last month, they moved things around a bit, bringing my bladder down so they could connect it straight to my urethra and fill in the gap. No filler was required, as the abdominal cavity changes size on its own.
Don’t forget circulatory juice, i.e. blood.
Isn’t omentum tripe?
Blood is overrated.