Minor Surgery Quotes

Minor surgery is an operation on someone else. You’ve heard that,

During my two years training as a medical examiner in New York City, I was quick to learn that there is no such thing as a 'minor' surgery.

There is not such thing as "minor" surgery. Minor surgery is surgery someone else has.

Because I live in south Florida I store cans of black beans and gallons of water in my closet in preparation for hurricane season. I throw a hurricane party in January. You’re my only guest. We play Marco Polo in bed. The sheets are wet like the roof caved in. There’s a million of me in you. You try to count me as I taste the sweat on the back of your neck. I call you Sexy Sexy, and we do everything twice. After, still sweating, we drink Crystal Light out of plastic water bottles. We discuss the pros and cons of vasectomies. It’s not invasive you say. I wrap the bedsheet around my waist. Minor surgery you say. You slur the word surgery, like it’s a garnish on a dish you just prepared. I eat your hair until you agree to no longer talk about vasectomies. We agree to have children someday, and that they will be beautiful even if they’re not. As I watch your eyes grow heavy like soggy clothes, I tell you When I grow up I’m going to be a famous writer. When I’m famous I’ll sign autographs on Etch-A-Sketches. I’ll write poems about writing other poems, so other poets will get me. You open your eyes long enough to tell me that when you grow up, you’re going to be a steamboat operator. Your pores can never be too clean you say. I say I like your pores just fine. I say Your pores are tops. I kiss you with my whole mouth, and you fall asleep next to my molars. In the morning, we eat french toast with powdered sugar. I wear the sugar like a mustache. You wear earmuffs and pretend we’re in a silent movie. I mouth Olive juice, but I really do love you. This is an awesome hurricane party you say, but it comes out as a yell because you can’t gauge your own volume with the earmuffs on. You yell I want to make something cute with you. I say Let me kiss the insides of your arms. You have no idea what I just said, but you like the way I smile.

In fact, other than factory farms, hospitals and doctors’ offices are the primary breeding ground of superbugs. A simple injection or a minor surgery can now, fairly routinely, lead to months in the hospital, or loss of limb, or loss of life.

He hopped out of the chair. His wrist hurt from the minor surgery, but it was better than having the Spacers corner him. He was more concerned about the noise. Random noises never meant anything good. He would have preferred if more had followed.

Start on clavicle. Remove middle third. Control and divide subsc art and vein. Divide large nerve trunks around these as prox as poses. Then come onto chest wall immed anterior and divide Pec maj origin from remaining clav. Divide pec minor insertion and (very imp) divide origin and get deep to serrates anterior. Your hand sweeps behind scapula. Divide all muscles attached to scapula. Stop muscle bleeding with count suture. Easy! Good luck. Meirion

Alexander the Magnus was once called to solve the following challenge in the Phrygian city of Gordium (as usual with Greek stories, in modern-day Turkey). When he entered Gordium, he found an old wagon, its yoke tied with a multitude of knots, all so tightly entangled that it was impossible to figure out how they were fastened. An oracle had declared that he who would untie the knot would rule all of what was then called “Asia,” that is, Asia Minor, the Levant, and the Middle East. After wrestling with the knot, the Magnus drew back from the lump of gnarled ropes, then made a proclamation that it didn’t matter for the prophecy how the tangle was to be unraveled. He then drew his sword and, with a single stroke, cut the knot in half. No “successful” academic could ever afford to follow such a policy. And no Intellectual Yet Idiot. It took medicine a long time to realize that when a patient shows up with a headache, it is much better to give him aspirin or recommend a good night’s sleep than do brain surgery, although the latter appears to be more “scientific.” But most “consultants” and others paid by the hour are not there yet.

It is now illegal in the United States to perform genital alteration on female minors, no matter how minimal the surgery or how safe and sanitary the procedure. Newborn male genital alteration, however, is an accepted procedure in the United States.

I lost my first patient on a Tuesday. She was an eighty-two-year-old woman, small and trim, the healthiest person on the general surgery service, where I spent a month as an intern. (At her autopsy, the pathologist would be shocked to learn her age: “She has the organs of a fifty-year-old!”) She had been admitted for constipation from a mild bowel obstruction. After six days of hoping her bowels would untangle themselves, we did a minor operation to help sort things out. Around eight P.M. Monday night, I stopped by to check on her, and she was alert, doing fine. As we talked, I pulled from my pocket my list of the day’s work and crossed off the last item (post-op check, Mrs. Harvey). It was time to go home and get some rest. Sometime after midnight, the phone rang. The patient was crashing. With the complacency of bureaucratic work suddenly torn away, I sat up in bed and spat out orders: “One liter bolus of LR, EKG, chest X-ray, stat—I’m on my way in.” I called my chief, and she told me to add labs and to call her back when I had a better sense of things. I sped to the hospital and found Mrs. Harvey struggling for air, her heart racing, her blood pressure collapsing. She wasn’t getting better no matter what I did; and as I was the only general surgery intern on call, my pager was buzzing relentlessly, with calls I could dispense with (patients needing sleep medication) and ones I couldn’t (a rupturing aortic aneurysm in the ER). I was drowning, out of my depth, pulled in a thousand directions, and Mrs. Harvey was still not improving. I arranged a transfer to the ICU, where we blasted her with drugs and fluids to keep her from dying, and I spent the next few hours running between my patient threatening to die in the ER and my patient actively dying in the ICU. By 5:45 A.M., the patient in the ER was on his way to the OR, and Mrs. Harvey was relatively stable. She’d needed twelve liters of fluid, two units of blood, a ventilator, and three different pressors to stay alive. When I finally left the hospital, at five P.M. on Tuesday evening, Mrs. Harvey wasn’t getting better—or worse. At seven P.M., the phone rang: Mrs. Harvey had coded, and the ICU team was attempting CPR. I raced back to the hospital, and once again, she pulled through. Barely. This time, instead of going home, I grabbed dinner near the hospital, just in case. At eight P.M., my phone rang: Mrs. Harvey had died. I went home to sleep.

Not all areas of medicine were created equal. In my humble (and extremely biased) opinion, ophthalmology is definitely the coolest. However, it is also (again, in my view) one of the more challenging ones to learn. It is neat to reflect on the variety of skills that we learn during our training, most of which demand exceptional hand-eye coordination. To excel, we require a very delicate and nuanced touch and a sophisticated appreciation of subtle alterations in the anatomy of the most beautiful organ in the body. From the different lasers to the assortment of minor and major procedures, there is definitely a lot to learn and then master. Even in our clinics, we make use of so many instruments that it’s almost like being in surgery but without the incisions!

Without his wife, the thought of his own death preyed on him, knowing that it might strike him just as suddenly. He'd never experienced death up close; when his parents and relatives had died he was always continents away, never witnessing the ugly violence of it. Then again, he had not even been present, technically, when his wife passed away. He had been reading a magazine, sipping a cup of tea from the hospital cafeteria. But that was not what caused him to feel guilty. It was the fact that they'd all been so full of assumptions: the assumption that the procedure would go smoothly, the assumption that she would spend one night in the hospital and then return home, the assumption that friends would be coming to the house two weeks later for dinner, that she would visit France a few weeks after that. The assumption that his wife's surgery was to be a minor trial in her life and not the end of it. He remembered Ruma sobbing in his arms as if she were suddenly very young again and had fallen off a bicycle or been stung by a bee. As in those other instances he had been strong for her, not shedding a tear.

about two miles east of where the infant had been discarded. It was a Medicaid hospital, meaning that most of the patients were poor. Despite its location, it had a world-renowned reputation. When my baby sister, Hannah, needed some minor surgery, Rina insisted that she be taken to Mid-City instead of one of the bigger, more moneyed behemoth hospitals on the affluent west side of town.

So it is that once a person has settled on the question as to what is wrong, the choice of cures is limited. You do not prescribe surgery for a minor cut, nor do you put a Band-Aid on cancer. The question of the human condition is, I believe, the most fundamental and consequential question of all.

We’ve been treating foot, ankle and knee problems since 1997, with a focus on high quality custom-made orthotics and a holistic, multi-disciplinary approach to patient care. Over time, this has been refined and additional services are now offered, including podiatry, minor surgery, injection therapy, ultrasound and dry needling. We stress continued development, including sourcing the latest research, techniques, materials and technology and integrating them as appropriate.

In 1984, a psychologist named Roger Ulrich studied patients recuperating from gallbladder surgery at a Pennsylvania hospital. Some patients were assigned to a room overlooking a small strand of deciduous trees. Others were assigned to rooms that overlooked a brick wall. Urlich describes the results: “Patients with the natural window view had shorter post-operative hospital stays, had fewer negative comments in nurses’ notes . . . and tended to have lower scores for minor post-surgical complications such as persistent headache or nausea requiring medication. Moreover, the wall-view patients required many more injections of potent painkillers.

For all its modern glamour and for everything else that the Tarot has become, it had a fairly humble origin; it began as a simple pack of playing cards. No matter what use the Tarot is put to today, from psychological insight to divination to collectible folk art, it began and remains a card game. Trying to understand the Tarot without knowledge of this fact would be like trying to perform surgery without any knowledge of anatomy. In both cases, we end up with a mangled product.

I go to my doctor, Dr Shah, for a check-up. He says he saw my husband in the surgery last week about a minor complaint. ‘He doesn’t love you, you know,’ he says matter-of-factly. ‘He doesn’t care about you. I’ve seen it many times, when the weaker of the two becomes dominant and tries to undermine the stronger one.

In 1984, a psychologist named Roger Ulrich studied patients recuperating from gallbladder surgery at a Pennsylvania hospital. Some patients were assigned to a room overlooking a small strand of deciduous trees. Others were assigned to rooms that overlooked a brick wall. Urlich describes the results: “Patients with the natural window view had shorter post-operative hospital stays, had fewer negative comments in nurses’ notes . . . and tended to have lower scores for minor post-surgical complications such as persistent headache or nausea requiring medication. Moreover, the wall-view patients required many more injections of potent painkillers.” The implications of this obscure study are enormous. Proximity to nature doesn’t just give us a warm, fuzzy feeling. It affects our physiology in real, measurable ways. It’s not a giant leap to conclude that proximity to nature makes us happier. That’s why even the most no-nonsense office building includes a park or atrium (in the belief, no doubt, that a happy worker is a productive one).

there is no such thing as “minor” surgery.