Plastic Surgery

For plastic surgery, we work mostly with a hand surgeon who I really like. Hand surgery is really different from the other surgeries I've seen. It's especially meticulous and precise, almost perfectionistic. Every motion is exactly as it's intended, every cut premeditated, every suture carefully tied. If it's not satisfactory, the surgeon redoes it. It seems that the margin of error for a tendon repair, compared to an intra-abdominal exploration, is a lot smaller. There are other differences, too. The surgeon sits, the tools are more delicate, the arm is put in a tourniquet to produce a bloodless field, and splints are used to maintain the position of various joints.

I've scrubbed into a lot of surgeries, including cyst excisions, scar revisions, tendon repair, exploration of stab wounds, palmar fasciotomies, ulnar nerve release, and scalp cyst removal. I really like the dissection of tendons, vessels, and nerves; for some reason, this is more exciting than laparoscopic dissection of the biliary tree or poking around the omentum. To be honest, if you had asked me that in my first year, I would have said the opposite; dissecting out nerves, vessels, and ligaments is horribly tedious. But now seeing the real thing, I'm really enjoying it.