I am attending the General Surgeons Australia Annual Scientific Meeting this year, and the first day was aimed at trainee’s. The theme for the conference is trauma, which is not an area I have worked in much before. I learnt things.
- In the next ten years, trauma will become the fifth largest cause of death worldwide.
- Surgeons have a responsibility to get involved in trauma prevention, as they are directly affected by the rising burden of trauma.
- Some people in real life actually perform emergency room thoracotomy and even save lives. Not actually something made up by medical melodramas.
- Blast injuries are cool intellectually, but you don’t want to have one.
- One of my colleagues checks my blog regularly to see if I’ve updated. And that is enough motivation to get me blogging again (Hi, DrJ!).
- It’s too hot to dance in Darwin, at least for more than a couple of hours.
- Classical literature is important in trauma (yesterday we learnt about Scylla and Charybdis, and The Art of War
- I learnt about massive transfusion protocols, which I wasn’t familiar with before. They are cool in the same way training pilots to recover from massive engine failure is cool. Ghoulish, adrenaline pumping, may work, but never a good place to be.
- Google maps doesn’t know about the sky bridge in Darwin. So I had a very unattractive walk to the conference yesterday. One of these days, I’m gonna have to start talking to real people.
- There are at least five approaches to stop blood flowing in the aorta to save someone’s life in massive abdominal bleeding. I really hope I never have to do this.
Hang on, didn’t you already learn about points 3, 8 and 10 when you worked with us?
@Doctor J (the other one):
Some of us need to learn things more than once before we truly understand them. (Thanks for bringing that to the worlds attention)