Pop-up Anatomy

On the tenth of December, my friend Rob and I hopped onto a train and went down to London to see the pop-up anatomy sessions. This was a one day only event, for the everyman, about surgery and anatomy. They had a couple of actors, a couple of dummies and a fair few doctors as well as all the mock equipment etc.  What happened was:

·         A young woman walked into the room. There was a mock consultation, where the doctor took a history and decided she had something wrong with her gall bladder, which needed immediate attention, and surgery (he skipped the testing for the benefit of the situation).

·         Next, a youngish man was wheeled in, clutching bloody pads to his stomach (he’d been “stabbed”) and the doctor talked a little bit about what would happen, before wheeling him back out into wherever he came from.

·         We were split into two groups: key hole surgery on the dummy with a gall bladder problem, and open surgery for the stabbed man.

·         We saw and touched a bit, listened to the doctor, then swapped to the other “theatre”.

I personally really enjoyed it, and found working with the laparoscope challenging but fun. However, I thought keyhole surgery would be a rarity – something done when you could afford to pay for it, or in exceptional medical circumstances, but one of the doctors was saying that it may end up becoming the norm, even in acute medicine. Already it is considered the standard procedure for gallstones, hernias, reflux (heartburn), excessive sweating, certain cases of hysterectomy (womb-removal), appendectomy (appendix removal), cruciate ligament replacement and obesity (to name a few).

But what exactly is keyhole surgery? Essentially, instead of a great big gash in your side which takes AGES to heal you have 4 or 5 little cuts which have ports implanted into them. Through these ports they operate a light, a live-feed video camera, and as many little implements as they need (scalpel, pincers etc). The benefits are basically, fewer traumas to the patient, less time needed to heal, less pain. However, the drawbacks are extra training needed, higher risks of complications and it’s a more difficult procedure.

I’m not rubbishing open surgery though – after all, if something goes wrong, the chances are they’ll pull out the ports, and then continue as if it were open surgery. I doubt keyhole will ever be used for problems like a  stabbing, although it could be possible at some point in the future.

With the open surgery he talked a bit about what they’d do – packing the abdomen in four quadrants to soak up blood, before removing them to see where the bleeding was coming from, if there was any damage to organs etc. I found this really interesting because of the pressure that would be on the surgeon to analyse the patient’s condition and try to fix problems, the risks of complications etc. It made me think about whether I’d want to do acute medicine if I ever got through medical school, and I’ve decided I would definitely consider it – it looks tremendously rewarding, regardless of the hours and stress.

At the end it was any questions, and I found one of the trainee surgeons and followed him about, listening to his answers to questions and asking a few of my own. It was all very interesting, and one thing he did mention was worth looking at was the Hunterian museum. Apparently it’s a museum dedicated to surgery, and should be interesting, especially as I'm considering going into that area of medicine (although I realise I'm far more likely to become a GP than a surgeon, it might happen!)

Also, if anyone is in London, the venue was the Wellcome collection, and is worth a visit – the other exhibitions they had were really good!

This link here is the web address for what I went to see, but I doubt it’ll stay open for that long after the event... http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/events/pop-up-anatomy-lesson.aspx
 

Where I got most of my backup info from:

http://keyholesurgery.net/index.html
http://www.aboutoperations.co.uk/keyhole-surgery.html