When there is just too much trauma!
The hospital in which I currently work is unfortunately not a Major Trauma Centre, although the head of Emergency General Surgery tells me that the Big Wigs have aspirations to make it one in the next 10 years - so long as Neurosurgeons can be persuaded to work here. Nonetheless, in a typical on-call week you can currently only be expected to be dragged down to A&E once or twice for a trauma call and consequently trauma laparotomies are vanishingly rare! Last weekend however, my Sunday afternoon got a bit exciting! The Consultant was being supportive and hanging around unscrubbed in theatre whilst I attempted a somewhat troublesome Hartmann's for perforated diverticular disease that had been brewing on the ward for a little while before deteriorating that morning. As I was firing the Contour stapler to divide the rectum, the trauma bleep went off, so we sent the SHO off to investigate and the Consultant scrubbed in to help me. Not long afterwards, the SHO called back to excited