Teaching Surgery

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(This is an excerpt from my new book, “Heart, Guts & Steel: The Making of an Indian Surgeon“)

I was assisting my Junior Resident with her first hernia repair. And it was moving along at a snail’s pace.

From time to time, I was tempted to urge her to hurry up. “If you stick with this, we’ll be here until dinner time!”

But I left the words unspoken.

Better surgeons than I had been patient with me while I learned to operate. Now it was my turn to return the favor. So in a quiet tone, with no trace of the irritation within, I asked her: “What are you worried about?”

Crisis

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(This is an excerpt from my new book, “Heart, Guts & Steel: The Making of an Indian Surgeon“)

My patient was going to die.

And if he did, it would be my mistake.

The thought was like a drumbeat, pounding inside my skull. Although still a trainee, I was the surgeon in charge of this operation. And I was in deep trouble!

“Give me a vascular clamp, quick!”

Losing Control

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(This is an excerpt from my new book, “Heart, Guts & Steel: The Making of an Indian Surgeon“)

A few minutes later, I was in the operating room, making an incision into his belly. It was full of clots. Clearly, the innocent looking stab had gone deep, slicing into vital organs.

When I cleared away the clots, we saw the problem. The knife had pierced his gall bladder, a tiny bag-like organ beneath the liver that stored bile. The wound had gone through it, barely missing the liver to stop milli-meters short of the largest vein in the body. Just a little deeper, and the patient wouldn’t have made it to the hospital alive!

Read “Heart, Guts & Steel” Now!

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To read the next section “Moment of Truth“, please register for free using the form below. I’ll also send you the first chapter of my new book”Heart, Guts & Steel: The Making of an Indian Surgeon”

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Book Review : How To Create A Mind

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I’m reading Ray Kurzweil’s “How To Create a Mind“.

Back in medical college, I spent an incredible amount of time reading Snell’s ‘Neuroanatomy’ to understand the structure and function of the human brain.

It’s a myriad of nerve connections, with different bits being hooked up to others, some nearby, others almost halfway across the brain. What’s more, there are redundancies galore. And keeping track of what links to what, through diagrams that showed sweeps of colored arrows pointing both ways, was mind boggling.

I read all of this, not because it’s so fascinating, but because we had an exam to pass at the end of a semester. About the lateral geniculate nucleus, or the caudate nucleus, or the red nucleus. And the insula, colliculi or corpus callosum. Without quite understanding how relevant, useful or practical it would all be.

It wasn’t. At all.

For the next twenty five years, I have never once had to use ANY of that information in my medical practice!

So, was it all a waste?