Self just joined a Doctors Book Club. So she can participate in the book club discussion on Do No Harm. She even sent a link to her nephew, William. The one who got married in September. The one who works at Columbia-Presbyterian.
Henry Marsh is doing his round of the spinal theatres. In one theatre, he asks the operating: “Why such a large incision? And why are you using the big bone rongeurs?”
Marsh goes over to the operating table.
“I’ll have a look.”
He picks up “a pair of forceps and” looks into the wound. “A long shiny white thread, the thickness of a piece of string — four or five inches long — came up out of the wound . . . ”
“Oh Jesus fucking Christ!”
SELF (Flapping her hands about): OH NO The student’s just cut someone’s spinal cord.
Marsh: The “registrar had completely misunderstood the anatomy and opened the spine at the outer end rather than the inner edge of the spinal canal and hence had immediately encountered a nerve root, which, even more incomprehensibly, he had then severed.”
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
