Weird Al Yankovic reference again....and here's a link to the song. Today I really felt like that.
The morning was busy, but I managed to get to surgeries mostly on time. My first one was a spay and it didn't exactly go like expected. As I ligated one of the ovarian pedicles (the part that attaches the ovary to the body wall and is filled with blood vessel) I put the needle through a vessel, causing a good amount of bleeding. I clamped and tied this off, then continued along. Then as I was doing more suturing the end kept slipping out of the needle holders before I could tie the knot; nothing serious, but frustrating. Just before closing the abdomen I always check for excessive bleeding and found some pooling blood. This meant that I had to extend my incision to look for the bleeder, which took some time (believe me, once you get to this point in the spay the vessels are deep in the abdomen and hard to find). After a large amount of searching I was able to see my ligatures, but couldn't find the bleeding. A few more minutes went by and eventually the bleeding stopped, not an uncommon occurrence. I tied off a suspicious area just to be safe, but my suture broke as I was doing so. Again, this is something that happens, but it was just adding to the whole frustration of the procedure. The dog was never in any danger as none of the blood loss was excessive, and any vet will tell you that each and every problem I ran into has also happened to them. Heck, a couple of times per week I pull a little too hard when tying a knot and have the suture break, forcing me to re-tie it. The problem was that all of these little things happened in the same surgery! Any one of them I would have been okay with, but the cascade of events caused the surgery to take twice as long and made me quite frustrated with myself. Thankfully the patient recovered normally and is doing great.
But it didn't end there.
As I was walking in to start the next surgery I ran into the surgery stand where we had the blood pressure monitor placed, almost knocking it over. Really? Thankfully that spay was routine. But the next procedure was a cat neuter, and the pet just didn't want to go under anesthesia, being particularly resistant and taking longer than I wanted. And it didn't end there. We collected blood from a cat for routine organ screening and I dropped the CBC tube. Thankfully it didn't break, as it was a difficult collection. The rest of the day continued along these lines, with little things happening like me running into things, dropping things, and getting "fuzzy brain syndrome" multiple times. As I said before, nothing was big, serious, or put any patients in danger. But the sheer number of things made me want to go home hit "reboot" on the day.
Unfortunately that didn't happen, as we had an absolutely crazy busy day. I literally had about 5-10 minutes at one point to eat my lunch before getting to my next patient (which is one of the reasons I almost always bring my own lunch) and otherwise was running non-stop from 9am until 7:30pm (we normally close at 7:00). And today my popularity was part of my downfall. It seemed like most of the clients wanted to see me and not my associate, so I saw around 2/3 of the patients, rather than the normal half. The last two hours were especially bad, as every client wanted to see me. My associate is a great doctor and has many loyal clients, but today it seemed skewed towards me. Normally I'm grateful that clients like me, but this time it was a bit ridiculous. My associate was available and I was trying to get caught up (or even just breathe), but no such luck. It was all on me.
Needless to say I was very glad to leave work and come home. And after ten hours of back-to-back patients I am mentally, physically, and emotionally drained. If there is any consolation to it all, we had a very good day business-wise. But I'm not eager to do it on such as scale again. I'm certainly going to enjoy the next two days off.
