CABG soup

We had a really cool lecture today on CABGs (pronounced “cabbage”). No, not the edible, flatulence-producing variety, but the heart variety. (Yes, I know the majority of my posts have been on cardiology, but bear with me because this is our last week of the cardio block. It’s been a long one). CABG stands for coronary artery bypass graft, or I guess more commonly known as open heart surgery.

So the cardiac surgeon today showed a lot of cool videos on some real surgeries. Like the real gory ones that they show on TLC or Discovery network except it was in our classroom. A nice change from the usual routine (aka not sleep inducing). There were videos of the ‘usual’ CABGs, with the vein/artery harvesting and then the actual graft procedure where they open up your chest, stop the heart, put it on the bypass machine and sew in the new vessel. The doc also said that sometimes the med student is the one to suture the vein to the heart. Uh…slightly concerning, but okay. If he’s cool with it.




He also showed some of the new fangled technology, with some new ‘tools’ called the ‘octopus’ and ‘starfish.’ There were also some examples of robotic surgery shown, including this thing called “da Vinci” which looked like it came out of a Star Wars movie. Anyways, the controller on this thing is crazy. The surgeon sits behind this, I guess you can call it console, and starts manoeuvring the machine through these joystick things. Almost like a video game. Actually, exactly like a video game. Haha…I knew my Wii skills would come in handy one day. Woohoo, Trauma Center champ! So the advantage of this is that you don’t have to open the patient’s chest, and everything is done through tiny incisions through their skin. The doc can even be in another country and still do the surgery. Wow, modern technology. Sometimes it just amazes me.