of Appendectomy...

My wish really came true and I got to witness an Appendectomy today. The woman presented with right lower abdominal pain at 门诊 and we got to feel her stomach, could feel a hard lump at her 麦氏点 and both 压痛 and反跳痛 were positive. Sent her to do an ultrasound and it supported the diagnosis so we had her hospitalized. After lunch break we went for the op. Had to change into scrubs but didn’t have to scrub hands cos we weren’t gonna touch anything :) Anyway I was pretty disturbed because the patient wasn’t under GA so she was still kinda conscious and halfway through the op she started moaning in pain. Worse thing was nobody paid heed to her as the nurse in charge of anesthesia was talking to another nurse at the doorway of the operating room. It went on for quite awhile but neither the doctor nor the assistants said anything and it made me uneasy. Until one of the nurses sitting in the room called the other nurse to take a look did she come and ask the patient whether she felt the pain. Then she started injecting stuff into the IV but the patient still did not stop so she gave her an injection above the collarbone. There came a point in time the patient’s breathing became abnormal and her oxygen saturation dropped to 70% and there happened to be only 1 nurse around so she had to call another to come help her pump oxygen into the machine by pushing the button repeatedly. It just felt pretty disorganized and unprofessional. I know docs make small talk during ops but to have the nurses talking among themselves just felt weird. This is my first major op here so I didn’t know what to expect. The operating theatre was made up of a row of operating rooms with all the doors wide open and different operations going on. Super open concept. And you have nurses walking in and out of different doors all the time. Is it like that in Singapore? An Appendectomy here costs 3500rmb, which is probably half the price of that in SG, and I wonder whether standards in China are just lax (our hospital is already in the highest rank, “三甲医院”) or it’s like that elsewhere too, just that I don’t watch ops in SG and for the only one I’ve been through, I was put under GA so I didn’t know a shit that was going on. Today the doc digged into her abdomen to find her caecum and appendix. It was difficult cos many parts had adhered together and he stuck his finger into her abdomen a few times -.- It was kinda sick, made me think of organ stealing, happy tree friends and whatnot. It was a pity it was too crowded so I couldn’t stand directly over her and stare into her insides but I did my best. Never occurred to me that he had to sew up all 5 layers of the stomach individually. After all the stretching and cutting she only required 3 stitches! I feel so cheated. Suspect a noob did my op last time -.- Anyway the entire op lasted about an hour. It could have been shorter but this one wasn’t so typical. And I never imagined the appendix would be so long. Hers was around 6cm and it looked kinda weird, maybe it was inflammed at certain parts.