Lots of patients and friends ask me “what actually happend during surgery?”
So I thought I would set out here a few of the proceedures we use during surgery to demistify what happens.
If you
To find out more about each scroll down…
In surgery it is often necessary to cut blood vessels, arteries (which have high pressure red oxygenated blood coming from the heart and lungs) and veins (low pressure purple blood with less oxygen in it returning to eh heart and lungs). In order to stop this bleeding two methods are used ligatures or diathermy. Diathermy is a method of using electrical current to dry and coagulate blood vessels. For larger vessels this is not successful and thus ligature is used- There are two methods of ligature – one is tying thread (suture) around the vessels before cutting it and the other is using a metalic clip to perform the same role.
These clips and sutures are designed to be left within the body similar materials are used in coils which can be placed within bleeding or abnormal blood vessels.
Nerve surgeons the world over use a number of different ways to connect nerves. In many cases stitches are still used these are very fine plastic stitches on a very tiny needle (more on those here) but many also use tissue glue.
Tissue glue or Fibrin glue. Is not really a glue at all but a part of blood which makes clot. The chemicals the body uses in blood to heal tissue are collected and can be used to create a control ‘clot’ to help heal the Neve to nerve repair.
I often use stitches and fibrin glue and sometimes both in different situations all over the body.
The fibrin glue I use is called Tiseel and information on it and how it is made can be found here.
