Gawande is a welcome addition to the growing list of contemporary physician-writers such as surgeons Richard Selzer and Sherwin B. Nuland, autobiographical commentators on medical training such as Perri Klass and Melvin Konner, and essayists on social issues such as David Hilfiker. This came as a shock to Bratton and her father, both of whom reluctantly gave permission to do the biopsy. These thought-provoking essays could contribute to discussions in medical humanities or biomedical ethics courses (for example, see Whose Body is it Anyway? The general surgeon on call, Dr. Studdert, was considering doing a below-knee amputation or an above-knee amputation; however, he decided to do a debridement, which meant he took out the most infected tissue in the leg and flushed the leg with saline. [3], Atul Gawande wrote the Complications during his surgical residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. This worked by putting a patient in a pressure chamber with a great deal of oxygen to speed up the healing since the immune system actually uses oxygen to fight infections. Accessed 24 Aug. 2017. Eventually, Dr. Gawande came into a position where he was the one supervising a junior resident as she put in a central line in a patient. She escaped probable death because Dr. Gawande shrewdly considered all the possibilities to give the life-saving early diagnosis of necrotizing fasciitis.

The therapy ended up working and after four more surgeries to take out the infected tissue, Bratton ended up being discharged from the hospital.

He convened the team before each case to discuss it in detail and afterward to debrief” (29). The surgeons that were the most successful chose “team members with whom he had worked well before and [kept] them together through the first fifteen cases before allowing any new members. Early diagnosis and treatment improve prognosis, but many with the infection have some of their appendages amputated and/or die. She, like Dr. Gawande before, had immense trouble setting up the central line, and every bone in Dr. Gawande wanted to take the central line and do it himself.

The bacteria is highly aggressive since the tissue infection spreads rapidly and cannot be treated by antibiotics alone. It was not that Caselli could not lose weight; he had trouble keeping it off like almost everyone.

Join our mailing list to receive the latest news and updates from Doctor in Progress. Future doctors learn how to perform a certain procedure by doing surgery on patients, meaning that some patients will have to be the first time for future physicians when learning a surgery, as is the case with Gawande when he learns to perform a central line.

It took some time and lot of physical therapy for Bratton to be able to use her leg for weight-bearing exercises, but it did not matter much to her because she still had her leg, and she was still alive.