Friday, August 15, 2008

I finally found it.

Yesterday I found the worst smell man has ever experienced. A rather large guy came in with a ridiculous mass protruding from his abdomen. Imagine if somebody put a basketball on top of your belly, and that's what this looked like. Anyway, it turns out that this was not a basketball, but a giant hernia. Now, the thing with normal hernias that is that sometimes a small portion of small intestine can poke out into them. This is worrisome because the intestines can get their circulation cut off that way, and then they die. Well, this guy had pretty much his ENTIRE small intestine poke out, and guess what- its circulation got cut off. So when they open this guy up in the operating room, they find this guy's intestines rotting. Yeah, you read that right. So imagine the smell of someone's entire small bowel rotting. Now, add to that the smell of all the feces in this small intestine. And we're not talking the semi-solid crap that we all know and love, this straight up diarrhea-style crap, and it's everywhere. To give you an idea about the magnitude of this smell, keep in mind that we are in a place where people routinely do surgery on limbs that have gangrene, and drain cysts full of puss, and no one really even flinches. I was in the room next to where they opened this guy up, and the nurses started putting vapor rub on our masks to try and block out the smell in our room just so we could finish our surgery. Then they went to the next room. By the end of this, the smell had cleared out an entire wing of operating rooms, and nurses were working in 15-20 minute shifts just to keep from puking. It was one of the most mind-blowingly horrific experiences of my entire life.

And then I went and got lunch.

2 comments:

Abby said...

Man, you really have a knack for showing just how glamorous it is to be a Dr.

Cara said...

wow.