Lev Lazinskiy

A flies eye view

“That is something that is uncommon to see in a hospital. A fly?”

Were the words that my patient said to me today in the middle of his surgery. I had three cases today and they took for freaking ever. I thought that the day was never going to end. We started at 0700 and by the time I was finished putting on the impossible ear bandage on my last patient it was 1400. The day literally flew by. It was full of sutures, sterile gloves, blood, and skin grafts. My idea of a perfect friday!

The morning seemed to fly by for the most part but then the last case took for ever. We were in a room with a broken clock and I had no idea what time it was. The patient had two different sites. The first on his nose was an easy routine closure. The one on his ear however was ridiculous. We did a graft by borrowing some skin from behind his ear and then placed that in his ear. Sounds pretty simple but it took about two hours. They put in countless sutures, and did everything with the utmost care. That is great for the patient , and it is interesting to see the huge differences between dermatology and general surgery. Dermatologists spend the majority of their time in surgery on the closure. They are adamant about having a pretty little wound. While general surgeons will run some sutures underneath the skin and bust out the stapler and get out of the room within minutes. If we did that we could probably see 20 surgery patients per day instead of just two or three.. but they would all be walking around with awful scars all over the place.

Yeah so back to this fly situation. The patient brought up the fly but I already had some sterile gloves on so what was I supposed to do? After the doc was done undermining under the skin to release the tension this fly came buzzing around and ALMOST landed inside of the wound! I was like Oh My Gosh! That would have been a interesting experience. I don’t think that we have a SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for how to clean a wound after a fly lands in it.