DAY ONE
On November 28th, we began our annual trauma week. Each year, we are given a scenario where we observe an injury and then are spoken by medical profession throughout the week to talk about the patient. This year, our scene began during a fake football game. One of the players on the offensive side was tackled and left with an open tib/fib fracture, holding his leg and whaling. Post injury, they escorted him by stretcher while trying to provide temporary treatment and relief. Once they made it to the ambulance, he was then taken to the ER. Because are school does not have its own hospital attached to it, our ER was the auditorium stage. There, each of the medical professions seen in the picture, plus more of to the side, discusses the injury at hand and how it will be handed through treatments and sugery. We watched videos on how this could've occurred and how the bone will snap with an overload of pressure put on it.
DAY TWO
Today, we were visited by Dr.Slauterbeck. Dr.Slauterbeck is an orthopedic surgeon and here to discuss the surgery Connor will be experiencing. Dr. Slauterbeck used to play football at Arizona State and graduated with a degree in chemistry, which he was not a fan of. He then went to New Mexico and got his orthopedic degree then transferred to UCLA for the next twenty-years. He acted as there sports post doc and a trauma surgeon while sitting on the sidelines. He has now been in Mobile for the past two years as the head chair at South Alabama College.To begin the procedure to head the surgery, they must begin to clean the wound. This is done with lactated ringers, or soap and water, then washed out with around nine liters of water. The surgery will be both external and internal and include plates, pins and roads, a tibial nail, and the insertion of an external-fixator. The team that will usually preform this will be the orthopedic surgeon, a nurse as the circulatory, an anesthesiologist, a scrub tech, and there may be an extra ortho surgeon on the side in case extra help is needed.
DAY THREE
Mr. Peter Rippey came to our third day of Trauma week to discuss concussions. A concussion is a traumatically induced transient disturbance of brain function. Despite what many assume, concussions are not always caused by direct trauma to the head but may occur due to transmitted force. If concussed, you may experience photophobia, phonophobia, vunlnerablity to a second injury, slower processing (both mentally and physically), and impaired cognition. A concussion is only clinically diagnosed; you cannot receive a diagnosis from a blood test or scan. After discussing the injury that occurred to our patient these past few days, we have began to notice Conner experiencing new symptoms. He is now becoming sensitive to light, loud noises, and states he did not sleep well the night of the incident while still feeling "foggy". Many times medicines can cause these symptoms so most concussions may remain un-diagnosed. To put it into an athletic perspective, around 1.6 to 3.8 million concussions a year in sports and you are at a 2-15% risk of concussions during the athletic season. Although these are large numbers, these are only 30% of the concussions actually reported. While teaching us the many facts of concussions, since they are so common around us, he also showed us way he checks his patients motor skills. He watched the way our pupils dilated and the balance based off vision in order to observe if the brain is processing correctly.
DAY FOUR
To start off the first day of December, Mrs. Elizabeth Boone came to visit our class along with one of her PT students, Rachel. Mrs.Boone is a physical therapist and is there to evaluate and record a patient's progress. To begin the class, we had to discuss the subjective; when and how did this happen? On Monday, Mr. Connor Mosley was tackled mid play during a football game and ended up with an open tip/fib fracture to his left leg, around the shaft area, and a mild concussion. By the time the patient comes to see Mrs. Boone, it will be post-surgery and he will be working on walking normal with the pins and rods located in the healing wound. Mrs. Boone will have to be cautious of the injury and the range of motion they are now limited to and work on trying to extend it to a more normal range. The session, between her and the patient, starts with the testing of both his right and leg knee in order to compare them afterwards and then proceeds to test each ankle.
While examining his knee and how it is bending, she notices it is only hitting about 95 degrees and not the normal of 130 degrees. She is also pulling and pushing against it in order to test its strength and resistance. She states it feels "shaky and unstable" and has a suspension of an ACL tear. As she proceeds to access the leg, she begins measures around the patella, the mid thigh, mid calf, the ankle, mid foot, and the base of the metatarsals. We can make the observation from the stated measures that the mid thigh of the right leg has decreased in size because of the lack of muscle use post injury. In order to help strengthen the muscles and help Connor regain normality in his leg. To begin the treatment, Mrs. Boone brought out a muscle stimulation. This machine contracts your muscles by sending signals to your nerves without the brain doing it alone. This helps the nerves get used to moving like that again and gets them used to it. After this, the patient would be told to attempt to move their muscles the same way the machine just did. While that is the easier treatment, she also goes through workouts like ankle pumps and straight leg raises to help re-grow the muscle and prevent blood clots. Lastly to end our discussion with Mrs. Boone, she taught our class how to use crutches. The use of crutches helps prevent putting pressure on that hurt leg, but can sometimes cause more injuries than it prevents if not handled correctly.
DAY FIVE
On December 2nd, Dr. Slauterbeck visited us once again. After discussing yesterday with Mrs.Boone that there is a possible ACL tear, Dr. Slauterbeck came to discuss the topic more in detail and the statics surrounding it. An ACL tear, or anterior crucial ligament tear, is when the load placed on the ligament is greater than it can stand. ACL tears mostly occur during the athletic season. You are more likely to tear your ACL, or any ligament,if the ligament is already lose prior to the injury. Women are even more prone to ACL tears and sprains. Females are quadriceps dominant, meaning the quad retracts faster than the hamstring, causing the tibula to pull forward when experiencing a harsh landing. Family history is also a big competitor. If a parent has experience with an ACL tear or sprain, their offspring is at five times more of a risk than the average person.To reconstruct the ACL, they remove the torn ACL and replace it with another such as the patella tendons or hamstring tendons.
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