How to Do a Liver Transplant by Kellee Slater Read Free Book Online Page A

those four years of training were the foundations for the rest of your life.
    Dr Smith thought that it would give me a great headstart to follow around a registrar called George Hopkins. George, who bears more than a striking resemblance to George Clooney, was an instantly likeable guy and seemed more than happy to have me as his acolyte. Keen as mustard, I was by his side every third night, as the call roster dictated. Together we would prowl the corridors of Nambour Hospital, tending to any patient in peril. We would sleep on the uncomfortable sofas in the tea room, getting up and down to answer our pagers. As there were scarcely any scans available when I was a junior doctor, we would often have to rely on our judgment or ‘clinical acumen’ alone to figure out what was wrong with someone and at that early stage of our training it sometimes wasn’t all that good. There were so many times that neither George nor I would have any idea what was wrong with a patient andwould have to call Dr Smith to tell him so. We would sit and argue for half an hour about who was going to pick up the phone and bear the brunt of the inevitable lecture about what hopeless doctors we were. We usually deserved it and the benefit of this was that we got our textbooks out for each patient we saw and tried to at least formulate some sort of coherent story before making the call.
    After I had been working with George for a few months, I saw a young man with abdominal pain. I managed to correctly diagnose him as having appendicitis and I rang Dr Smith to tell him about it.
    â€˜Well, what are you waiting for?’ he said. ‘Get on with it. Do you think you can handle it?’
    I wasn’t sure if he meant that I was supposed to handle it, so I handed the phone to George, who listened and smiled.
    â€˜He means you do it alone, Kel,’ he said warmly, sounding like a proud father. The plan was that George was to sit in the tea room, poised to come to my aid, and I was to perform my first solo operation. This was a big day for me, and a virtually unheard-of opportunity for a junior doctor.
    The moment came to commence my maiden operation. I had helped George take out appendixes several times before, so even though I was nervous, I was pretty sure I was ready and knew the steps of the operation off by heart. I checked everything, twice. Patient asleep, check; nurse ready, check; instruments ready, check. Surgeon ready, notreally. My sphincters were tightly clenched as I clutched the scalpel and stood over the patient, poised to make that first cut. I could feel the eyes of everyone in the theatre upon me, ready to call for help if I exhibited a moment of ineptitude. I stood up straight, let out my deeply held breath and made a purposeful and reasonably straight cut in the patient’s right lower abdomen. I carefully split open the muscles of the abdominal wall, layer by layer, just as I had been shown. When I had gone through what I thought were the necessary three layers, I was dismayed not to have arrived in the abdominal cavity where I should have been looking at glistening bowel. I fluffed around until the scrub nurse said, ‘I think you have to go through one more layer.’ Happy that my surgical mask was in place to hide my red face, I broke through this last impediment and finally entered the abdomen. Lo and behold, the offending appendix, dripping in pus, was just sitting there looking at me. Thank goodness it wasn’t hiding up behind the liver or some other godforsaken place. I removed it without further delay.
    Dr Smith telephoned the operating theatre at least three times during the surgery, just checking if I was all right and, more importantly, that the patient was. It is only now that I am a surgeon myself that I can appreciate just how anxious he must have been feeling, freeing a junior doctor from her training wheels. A few days later, my patient left the hospital alive, minus one appendix. I