At this point I start to set up my back table, which is used by me to organize all the instrumentation that will be used for this particular surgery. Once the patient is properly positioned on the operating room bed, anesthesia begins to put the patient to sleep. When the patient has been put to sleep the operating room nurse begins to prep the site that will be operated on. While the nurse I still prepping the site the Dr. is paged to the room and enters a few minutes later, to ensure that the patient is positioned correctly. He then leaves the room to wash and scrub his hands for the surgery, when he is finished he enters the room again and I gown and glove the Dr. .
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When the prep is finished the Dr. and I begin to drape the patient to create the sterile field that we will work on. When the draping is complete the surgery will begin and the Dr. will ask for the scalpel to make the first incision. .
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When the surgery is complete the Dr. will close the incision site with suture and anesthesia will bring the patient out of their sleep and transport the patient to the recovery room. Now everything was going great, just like any other day, as was mentioned earlier. At about 1430 on this particular Thursday, my team and I were notified that we would be departing immediately for a mission. The members of my team and I departed the operating room quickly to .
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Return home and retrieve all of our personal gear assigned to us just for occasions such as these. We had one hour to accomplish this task, then to return back to the operating room until it was time for us to depart. I am assigned to the 160th Forward Advanced Surgical Team (FAST), which is a unit that was created for the sole purpose of emergency neurological and orthopedic surgery in a combat or hostile zone. Our mission is to depart, land, locate our equipment, proceed to the destination point, setup, operate, and withdraw.