A Chick Lit-erary Magazine for writers & readers of contemporary women's fiction.
In this premier Pumpkin Spice Chick Lit Issue you'll find:
Short Stories
Flash Fictions
Author Interview
Essay on Chick Lit
Book Review
How to Write Good Sex Scenes
...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
SHORT STORY
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
"Suction, please."
My surgical scrub nurse places the suction tube with a .3-mm suction tip into the incision.
Then I peer down the 16-mm diameter access port.
The patient is a soldier. Female, mother, age 30 years and 6 months, discharged on inactive duty for the last 4 months and 3 days with a herniated disc. These are my gold star patients. They want to get back into the fight and have a rigorous exercise routine. In other words, they're active and aren't obese. It takes 5 minutes 30 seconds off my patient positioning time and they have a 17 percent higher recovery rate.
I've precisely placed the surgical incision between the 4th and 5th vertebrae directly over the root compression nerve. Using my dominant hand, I use the Penfield dissector to retract the traversing nerve root. With my non-dominant hand, angled at 90 degrees perpendicular to the patient's spine, I remove the disc herniation with pituitary ronguer.
I stare at my work in pride.
The surgery is a success and will have a recovery time of approximately 6 weeks. I'd completed the surgery in 39 minutes and 21 seconds. It's 2 minutes slower than my best time, which happens to be the fastest recorded time of any successful microdisectomy of a herniated disc. In other words, I am the fastest. And not only the fastest but the best. I have one of the highest patient success and recovery rates in the entire country.
There is a degree of difficulty in MIS surgery. With a circular surgical field, less than 25-mm in diameter, you cannot orient your pathology by using surrounding anatomy. While other spinal surgeons create a foot-long incision along the patient's back to get to the offending pathology, I have an incision the size of a coin. I'm not only the fastest, the best, but I'm also one of the most innovative.
I look over at my surgical resident.
"Close up for me, Dr. Ivanov. I require a coffee break."
I place my tools on the surgical instrument table and take a step back from the patient. And my surgical resident steps forward.
