SurgeXperiences Carnival 122

It’s been eye-opening to read submissions from all over the medical blogosphere this fortnight. This is the first blog carnival I have hosted, and I now appreciate the amount of effort that previous hosts have put into it.

A few weeks ago, a young man presented with a chicken bone lodged transversely in his distal rectum. After the ED registrar and consultant had spent over an hour trying to remove it, I thought it would be easiest to cut it in half. Dr Wes felt that he had a similar epiphany in MacGyver Moments in Medicine.

I’m not sure whether this qualifies as pornography or a fetish post, but Make Mine Trauma at IntraopOrate describes in Oh Say Can You See her secret fantasy of seeing her internal organs. Hey, anything that gets your rocks off, baby. ;-)

MB Herrera at Life, Money & Development describes in Natural Recipe for a Healthy Prostate some Level 6 evidence for relieving BPH. Personally, I think it is the result of too much masturbation... but you can't stop human nature, can you?

When I first read Øystein’s blog I thought: “This guy has too much time on his hands.” I quickly realised that he is not just a voyeur, but films operations for a living. His submission was "Filming surgery with camcorders". My tip - never let a sound recordist into your theatre, and if they do, insist that they remove that hairy dog from their microphone, unless you are happy for your patient to have their wound infected with bizarre and rare bacteria or fungi.

In a post reminiscent of poor Otto in Helen Palmer's "A Fish Out Of Water", TherapyDoc submitted "The End Stage" where she seems to have reached a zen moment with her fishy charge.

Bongi almost didn't make it in with Surgical Ego because he didn't flatter me enough, but I felt that I had to prove him wrong. Therefore I'm also listing his other submission No Wining about the trials and tribulations of being berated in a unit meeting. Don't worry, I once had the same experience (and criticism) after doing a trauma thoracotomy in ED. May I refer you to this article? It has helped me enormously.

Dr Deb writes about a man who apparently underwent hand surgery without any anaesthesia, placing himself into a trance only. Honestly, I didn’t find this very interesting. It left me feeling rather numb.

Suthacha_Xiang Mei writes about her first surgical rotation. It's always good to see some enthusiasm in our medical students, locally and globally.

Thanks everyone for a great range of submissions, and I wish you all the best in your blogging lives – and please keep reading my blog, too! Please keep reading SurgeXperiences and the next carnival will be hosted in a fortnight at The Sandman. Post submissions here.