Surgery: Today Has Just Been One of Those Days...

Today has just been one of those days. You know, one of those days where you come in the morning all studied up and ready to scrub in on a radical cholecystectomy with liver resection and lymph node dissection (and ready to impress, having memorized all the staging systems and appropriate treatments and prognoses for gallbladder carcinoma), but end up getting diverted to a colorectal resection which starts out laparascopically but turns into an exploratory laparotomy (open surgery), and then the anastamosed (reconnected) colon somehow loses its blood supply and starts to die and you have to do it all over again with another piece of colon and now the patient has an ileostomy too and it was supposed to take 3 hours but it took 8... and then the second patient of the day who was supposed to go at 11 ends up going at 6 and has a carcinoma of the pancreas which has decided to wrap itself around the superior mesenteric artery thereby making it unresectable (read: we opened him up and couldn't take the tumor out anyway). And when it's all finally over at 11 PM you just want to shoot yourself so you don't have to come in at 5:30 AM again tomorrow morning.

You know... one of those days.