You keep hearing about “such and such surgery took 13 hours” or whatever. I’m personally looking at one that will be 8ish hours (yikes) some time next year.
How on earth does that work in terms of the staff? How do they manage pee breaks? The need for food? Severe foot fatigue?
I mean, there are loads of nurses handy, but only one or two doctors - do they just say “keep 'er breathing, gotta take a dump”? “Can you bring me a cheeseburger? Whoops, I guess she’s got a pickle in her intestine now”?
I am quite sure there are protocols, but Chicago Med and the like don’t show that part of the process.
From what I’ve read, if the operation is long enough (say, 20+ hours,) everyone will indeed rotate. The surgeons will rotate, the anesthesiologist, scrub nurses, circulating nurses, etc. Some people wear diapers so they won’t have to do bathroom breaks.
I scrubbed into a 17 hour surgery as a medical student (liver resection, very boring). I don’t remember if the chief surgeon took any breaks, but everyone else did. Never heard of anyone resorting to diapers.
Someone I knew had a 20 hour surgery. They worked for 10 hours, took half day break and then another 10 hours. It was a for a very rare caudal cancer and the main concern was that the patient not end up paralyzed.
I recently went down a rabbit hole regarding pelvic exenteration and sacrectomy, two very drastic operations I’ve personally never been involved with on any level, but are apparently performed not infrequently in Australia. (One particular team was, I kid you not, celebrating their 500th exenteration!) This is an operation where the bladder (and prostate in men), rectum, and the reproductive organs in women, are removed and the ureters and bowel routed into permanent stomas. There do exist procedures for vaginal reconstructions, if a woman wants it. The research I did said that the longest anyone had ever lived this way was FORTY-TWO YEARS. Me? I’d rather die than go through something like that IMNSHO.
X-rays after sacrectomy are pretty freaky looking, too. Sometimes, they can be partially reconstructed with what could best be described as metal struts.
I’m not the only person who has heard about a long operation, and wondered if there are times where the surgeon encounters something they weren’t expecting, and saying, “Whoa, what do we do about this?” This definitely happened to Sebastian Junger a few years ago, when he had a burst abdominal aneurysm, and the interventional radiologists found out he had some majorly messed up internal anatomy. (At one point, Junger, along with his father a lifelong “none” spiritually, had his late father show up to him and say, “Come with me; things will be all right.” It got him doing a lot of thinking.)
I saw a few instances where a person had a brain tumor, usually on the pituitary but not always, removed through the nose. The ENT broke the nose and patched it up afterwards, and the neurosurgeon removed the tumor itself.
Back in the day, the Discovery Channel had a program called “The Operation” where they showed that being done. IIRC, the man had acromegaly and this cured him.
AFAIK, there has never been a case of twins joined at the head being separated with both children surviving unscathed. At least one has always had some degree of disability, usually severe.
My big facial reconstruction was almost 7 hours.
And they didn’t do my eye socket.
They had to go back later for that, when they determined my eye was not salvageable.
I thought about this and asked the surgeons assistant. He said you get used to holding your pee and not eating or sleeping regularly as an intern.
If the surgery is more than that I bet they have a plan.
Oh, and what was going on with the patient while the surgeon took that break? Was anyone else working on the patient, or was he just lying there, asleep, while being monitored?
I find it highly plausible, and I’m surprised there’s so much pushback. Some people, specially older men, need to pee frequently. This can happen when a man is still in excellent physical and mental condition otherwise. And i imagine that the washing and gowning required to enter a surgical arena is burdensome, and some men would rather use a Depends and not have to deal with that too often during a long procedure.