Friday I saw four more surgeries: two elbows, a wrist/arm, and a tendon transfer/ankle. They were amazing.
The tendon transfer was for a beautiful young girl, who the orthopedic doctors see every six months. She was born with both feet very deformed, but with quite a few surgeries, she is able to walk, and the doctors are slowly but surely straightening her feet and ankles.
Both elbows were very similar: the person's range of motion was very small. In one case it was because there was extra bone growth on the elbow, so they just took a little out, and all was fixed. In the other case, they had to put pins in, and it was a little more intense, but because the child was so young, he will probably regain almost complete motion.
The arm surgery was the craziest though. The man had broken his arm years ago, and it hadn’t healed correctly. He had gotten two separate surgeries on it to try to fix it, and both surgeries had just made it worse to the point where his forearm had a visible curve to it. The doctors removed pieces of bone, and screwed and plate the remaining bone together. Cool fact about healing bones: bones only heal if they are under compression. The holes in the plate the doctor used had sloped sides, so he started the screw at the very edge of the hole, and as it was going in, it slid down the sloped side and pulled the two pieces of bone together.
The doctor was telling us about how so many of the things we are able to do in the medical field, especially orthopedics, are only possible because of engineers. The people that come up with the new materials and new devices that imitate the human body are part of the team we have to thank for the advances we have made.
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