Today we were back with the first Nacho, the bald one we had on Monday. I finally asked Carla (our site manager) why Nacho is such a common name in Spain even though its a type of cheese, and she told me its the nickname for “Ignacio”.
Our first surgery was a fun one because the bone saw came out. Our patient was a female in her 80s with a hip fracture located on the neck of the femur. Dr. “Ignacio” told us that when a fracture occurs there, no blood supply to the head of the femur is received, causing the tissue to become necrotic. He would need to put in a new, artificial head and neck of the femur. If the trochanter was the part that was fractured, he could simply put in a nail to fix it.
Out came the electric bone saw. Dr. Nacho was teaching a resident how to perform the surgery. She was a small girl about my size and I kept wondering how she was going to pull this off: all the other orthopedic surgeons I had seen thus far were large, muscular men. However, she ended up surprising me. Blood was spattering everyone’s scrubs, face, and glasses but the resident kept going with incredible accuracy and steady hands. I must have been making an uncomfortable face because the anesthesiologist walked up to me and said: “I don’t like the sound of it either. You get used to it though.”
The resident chopped off the head and neck of the bone and then hammered the stake deep within the femur. The socket prosthetic slipped right into the acetabulum of the pelvis, and she sewed up the patient like it was no big deal.
Our second surgery was another hip replacement, but this one was for a non-ambulatory female in her 90s. This time, Dr. Nacho was leading, and he told us that he traditionally prefers the posterolateral approach to hip replacements: entering the joint from the backside verses the lateral approach (side) or anterolateral approach (front).
Dr. Nacho did the surgery within 2 hours without any complications, while still joking around with the other surgeons and spraying them with sterilizing water. I realized that I would miss the orthopedics department. All the surgeons I had met were fun people, and I mean that in the most sincere way. They made sawing bones fun.
Anna-phylactic Shock 