Surgery

So this is the first post that could actually be considered a legitimate blog entry. I had what I consider a fairly significant experience today, so I thought I would share it with the online community.

Today, I performed my first, and hopefully penultimate, surgery ever. The penultimate part will make sense later. Of course, the surgery was on a mouse, and I botched it horribly. It was actually quite a sobering experience. What happened, you ask?

Well, the surgery was a castration, so had the mouse lived he would never have had babies again thanks to me. But since the mice were going to be euthanized anyways, the fact that he would not reproduce was a little irrelevant. Things started out well. After some chasing around the cage, and help from my classmate who assisted me, I was able to grab the mouse and keep him steady enough to aenesthetize him. He became immobile fairly quickly, and so I began the surgery. Let me tell you, I am so grateful that the poor mouse was scheduled to be euthanized after being subjected to my inexperienced hands. After fumbling around with his viscera for an inordinate amoung of time, I was able to remove one testis. At this point, though, the mouse started to regain consciousness! Luckily the TA was able to anesthetize him before he regained full consciousness, but he was twitching for a while until he was immobile again. The pained expression of my classmate assistant as the mouse jerked about is still uncomfortably vivid in my mind. To top it all off, I couldn't find the second testis! So my mouse still had one ball when I stiched him up. Furthermore, the castration was the simple surgery. Half of the class did the vasectomy, which was way harder. I couldn't even find the Vas Deferens in all that mess. I think I'm going to have nightmares about waking up to mice performing a botched castration on me!

Next week, I am going to perform this surgery again, but this time, the mice are not scheduled to be euthanized. The object is for them to live. I have gained a whole new level of respect for people who do this every day of their lives, and quite honestly at this point, I never want to cut up a living thing again. Hopefully I'll be ready to do this by next week, but in the meantime, I am trying to soak up all I can on proper surgical technique. I want my mouse to live, darn it!

I come away from this for an appreciation for the deep-rooted desire for life that we all share, and the profound feeling that though we may feign to play God, we are as blind worms when it comes to our understanding of His creation. Of course, I also learned that I am a bad surgeon. But who knows, maybe I'll get better!