A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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cross-posted from: https://thelemmy.club/post/54296827
One time I was in the ER, and a doctor noted that my heart beat has a rather pronounced split s2 rythm which is something that doctors need to learn to discern when listening to a heartbeat, so for the next hour as I was waiting around, I had several other younger physicians stop by and say "hey I was told to come listen to your heartbeat."
Made me feel a little special in a very peculiar way I haven't known since.
A girlfriend's father had a condition where his organs were mirrored to the opposite side of the body and his circulatory system ran backwards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situs_inversus)
Him and his family doctor loved bringing new coworkers in to do a "liver check" or something like that, and watch the person probe around with their hand and slowly get confused, then kind of freak out, when they couldn't find organs in the body.
They did it for many years and both thought it was hilarious.
They didn‘t put everything back after the operation. That’s how I end up with random screws after any repair I do.
[doctor sweeping piece of bone under carpet after surgery]
They try to use it in the next operation. Somebody out there with mismatched bones. One leg longer than the other.
And a paternity test that doesn’t match the mother
Doctors would do no such thing!
...they'd actually just waltz around the hospital with whatever fell onto the OR floor still stuck to their shoe, tracking chunks of it all over the fucking place until some some crusty 70 y/o nurse chews him out while swatting him with today's word search from the news paper.
Pretty routine stuff, really.
😷🧹🦴📜🤫
Um... so looking at the tibia, that is 100% an intramedullary tibial nail:
...which means their tibia was broken as fuck, and there's a pretty hefty chance the fibula was also broken as fuck in that same injury.
My guess is the missing segment was fragmented to the point of not being saveable, and removed during the same operation the IM nail was placed.
That doesn't necessarily mean the OP is bullshit - maybe they had some new resident docs, or nurses, or techs or w/e who hadn't seen that before and it was a genuine wtf moment for them. I love it when new staff get that look!
Is it not a problem to have part of your fibula missing? Can you operate without it?
It's not an issue, and pretty easily as it's not a major weight bearing structure. It mostly functions as an attachment point for various muscles and as A part of the articulation of the ankle joint. Part of it is commonly harvested for use as a bone graft.
The most commonly harvested area starts right at the top of where the missing section begins, so I suspect this post may be bullshit.
I don't think we'd have lasted long as a species without a little bit of "redundancy".
I don’t know horses get pretty screwed when they break a leg even with the best medical technology at the owners disposal.
To be fair to horses, their legs are fingers, which doesn't help the problem.
I’m imagining sports would be a lot more brutal if once a player got injured, they send out “the vet” onto the field to destroy them if they got any broken fingers or toes.
It probably was not recoverable when they repaired whatever made that Titanium splint and screws neccesary.
Edit: apparently the middle portion of the fibula is so non-essential for weight-bearing that it is the most common bone harvested for bone grafts elsewhere in the body
Oh so the caption is completely made up
Not necessarily, it could be a group of people who weren't aware of removing the bone being a thing, but it's probably a lie for internet points.
The defibrillator strikes again!
Full disclosure: I am not a doctor.
It's always a great feeling when a doctor looks at something from you and then calls their colleagues to look as well..
"Good news, you're about to have a disease named after you!"
My eye doctor did that on one of my recent visits. Apparently my astigmatism is exceptional...
"Do you want the good news or the bad news first?"
"The good news"
"We're going to name the disease after you"
Tibia surgery affected chronic blood loss to areas of the fibula and thus osteonecrosis of the affected bone. This patient probably has some serious health issues outside their bone health for this to happen.
And even weirder, someone put all these titanium pins in my tibia!
Titanium? In this economy?
I got into a car crash and went to the ER to get an X-ray done to make sure nothing was off, not this was a week after the crash. Anyways hurt like a bitch and after awhile of waiting the X-ray gets done and the tech just kinda looks at it for a minute, turns to me and says "Two bits of good news, your knee is just inflamed and swollen no breaks, also Ive been doing this for awhile and your bone density is absurd" which is how I found out that I'm a freak of nature who has borderline unbreakable bones. Explains why I struggle to swim in fresh water so much.
I hope you got titanium. It's bio compatible with bone and will fuse together. Took about ten years for me. I was told it's not important to have a fibula but I think mine probably merged back together since it doesn't feel like razor blades in my leg.
Looks like major leg construction, someone removed it and forgot to put it back in
In one of the initial reposts, someone commented there was a complete fracture and the separated part was absorbed naturally over time.
Might have been bs, as it's known to happen.
Scientifically speaking, it was probably the fae stealing your bones.
Most likely actual source: fibular free flap reconstruction.
https://myoms.org/what-we-do/oral-head-and-neck-pathology/fibula-free-flap-reconstruction/
Tl;Dr the fibula doesn't hold weight, it's just there to provide a connection point for tissue and ligaments, so when you need a long, straight length of bone that isn't doing anything important they just cut out a section of fibula. Plus if you get really really lucky (or are a child) it might even grow back.
