What was your big, oh, oh no, moment in a surgery?

I was doing a corneal transplant when I had the oh crap moment.

During surgery, I cut off the patient's own cornea and replaced it with a new donor cornea.

During that moment when the host's cornea was off, but before I could get the new one on,

there's literally

nothing on the front of the eye except a tear film and acuous humour. Anyway, the patient takes

that moment to start emptying their stomach orally. The reason we tell everyone to skip food

and drink is that they don't aspirate in case they throw up. This patient lied about eating

breakfast and started just chucking it up everywhere.

The eye is still open sky at this time. Everything inside of the eye can now become outside of the eye.

And she's buckling and blowing chunks everywhere. Those in the know will say this is not good.

Those really in the know will say, oh crap. Anyway, I had to grab the new

cornea and start stitching as fast as I could on a patient actively chucking up. I use

10-0 nylon sutures which are thinner than an eyelash. It turned out okay, but not great. Don't

lie about eating breakfast before surgery, folks.

I work in the operating room and I've seen some pretty interesting things.

First day on the job, the surgeon was doing a lap sleeve gastrectomy.

During this procedure, a medical device is used to cut and staple the stomach simultaneously.

However, in this case, the medical device failed. The stomach was cut open, but the staples never

engaged, which left the patient with an enormous gash in the stomach. The surgeon ended up finishing

this part by hand. There was also the time I got called into the room to ensure the laparoscopic

camera was working and able to record. This was a six-hour cardiac procedure and was nearing

...