Monday, October 23, 2006

Monday Night Medical Update

By Britt:

This is the part of the show where Britt comes out and sings, a warning song. So everyone who has no interest in finger ampuation, a machete cut .... please do not torture yourself by scrolling down. Do you remember last night how I wrote that it would be really sweet to get a picture of the bone to actually show? Well ya, we succeeded today. This is the part of the post when Britt ends the warning and posts a non-gory picture just so the bad ones don't show up at the top. :)





Paige was a great helper today. She was the runner, going and grabbing stuff, and the chaplain, praying before everything we did and sometimes during the tough parts when the patients were hurting/crying a lot. Since I posted the photos in backwards order, I will just have to write from the end of the day back. In the above photo, we used a blood pressure cuff as a tourniquet. This wound is posted below, so I will explain about it in the below post where the before and after photos are. Sorry, I wasn't really thinking when I loaded the photos in this random order.

Because I am tired and I used poor planning .... the 'before' picture that goes with the photo below, is three pictures down. It is the first photo on the continued post. Once again, sorry, my bad.

This (below) is Miguelson, he is 8 and he lives in Barbancourt. His mom isn't really around, it sounds like she has a different husband than his father and lives somewhere else. So, he lives with his aunt. Today, he was playing (unsupervised). He was, for whatever reason, playing with a machete. Seems kind of fun, right? Ya, right up until the point where you cut off the tip of your thumb. Then it becomes a little less fun.

So, we did another digital block (with Paige, Sharon, his aunt, and Jamie all holding him down for that part). Next we opened up all the tissue around the bone to get it to the point where the bone was in access to be clipped, sticking out like this:




If you haven't fainted yet, I will continue. So next I removed the little remaining portion of the nail bed. Which wasn't as gross as I thought it was going to be, but I don't think I want to pull off a complete nail anytime soon. After that, I clipped the bone so that it was short enough for the remaining flap of skin to be stitched up over it. The final product turned out kind of weird, the angle is odd. But it took 9 sutures, and the flap of skin was trimmed a little bit so that the edges matched well.