A Day in the Life of a Spine Surgeon

I was unable to get an interview from my mentor, so the best I can do is explain the consistent schedule of a surgeon (or at least what I saw). First, the day usually starts off with either early morning clinic or surgery, and depending on the surgery, it could last a while. A lot of a surgeon's day (from what I saw) consists of surgery or clinic except for the day or two in a week where they meet with their colleagues and collaborate on confusing or interesting cases that they would like the other physicians' opinions. Other than that, their day consists of those two things, but again this was only what I saw. Thank you for reading my blog posts and this will be my last on this blog page.

EMGs and SSEPs

Day 12

For the first part of the day, I was in radiology and to be honest, it was the most boring thing I have sat through throughout my whole internship. The best part was that we got free breakfast. We watched about 3 or 4 Xrays and the rest of the time was spent sitting around, so it wasn't too thrilling. The rest of the day was great. I got to watch a hip replacement and Dr. Lawton allowed me to hold and look at the ball of the hip of the patient and it was one of the coolest things I have seen in my life. They had to replace this ball because it was very arthritic and there was no more cartilage on the ball, so it was rubbing bone-on-bone. Today was up and down, but it was still a great day.

Day 11

Yesterday, I caught a stomach bug, so I did not go to my internship. Nothing to blog about for Day 11.

Day 10

I did not do my blog for Friday, so here it is. Friday was a good day. I spent the first half of the day with Dr. Robert Wallach. I enjoyed it because he cleared some terminology for me and he is also a hilarious doctor. After lunch, plans changed. I was supposed to go to nursing at Mercy, but instead, I went to an emergency spine surgery for a man who slipped in his kitchen and fractured one of his lumbar vertebrae. I was there until 4:40 with Caleb and I found it pretty fun. Friday went by fast, but I enjoyed it.

Day 9

Today was one of the best days in this internship, even though it was tiring. Today, I spent  most of the day in the operating room watching a specific lumbar fusion called an XLIF (extreme lateral interbody fusion). I'm not going to go into what all of that means, but they start the process by going in through the side of the body where the herniated or degenerated disc is. After the incision, they use a dilater to find where the nerves are. Then they remove the disc and place a spacer with a bone graft in it. Then, they stitch the wound up and flip the patient onto his/her stomach. Then the surgeon makes an incision in the back to get to the vertebrae that needs fusing. After that, a cage made from pedicle screws and metal bars is inserted where the fusion is needed. Then the patient is stitched up and that's it. There's actually a lot more involved, but I'm not going to go into detail. The patient I viewed today had a 4 level fusion. She was fused from L2-S1(2nd lumbar vertebrae-1st sacral vertebrae). I was amazed at how smooth most of the procedure went. I  was in the operating room for about 5 hours, so it is not a short procedure. I think the time spent was worth it.

Day 8

Today was a different and unusual day for me. This morning, I was in a case conference, where all of the physicians get together and talk about complicated cases or cases that may need another surgeon's opinion. That was a good experience. After that, I spent the next three hours in a respiratory ICU, which cares for patients with severe lung diseases or problems. Between the horrible sounds and the sad atmosphere, it was not the best experience ever. I finished my day off by having a meeting with Dr. Youssef and some of the other physicians and research staff. At first, it was a little intimidating, but throughout the meeting, I felt a little more comfortable. So, besides the time spent in the ICU, today went pretty well.