On November 29th, it was the second day of trauma week after I missed the first day, so I was catching up. Essentially what took place the day before was there was a run-through of a football player getting injured, and immediate care people cleaned their leg wounds and did some first aid. The person talking today was Dr. Slauterbeck, and he was a very entertaining person. Essentially the patient we are looking at has a tib/fib fracture. He then went on to explain many other components to fracture, such as angle, how far off the bones are from normal in centimeters, and the degree of the fracture, which is essentially how bad the bone is splintered. The treatment for the fracture took a little while for us to figure out, but it's a rod that must go in the bone two weeks after the procedure of putting in an external fixator which is a thing that lies outside of your skin and is connected to your bone. That was really freaky to me because it means that you're going to have something outside of your skin that gets all the germs of the outside world that connects to your leg bone. The overall time to put in the fixator would actually only be around 30 minutes in an emergency situation. He handed us a see-through bone that had the rod in it and then an external fixator. Dr. Slauterbeck made this seemingly un-entertaining day very interesting!
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