Jayden Dunn

04/24/18

Pediatric Surgery

Today I got to experience pediatric surgery. I was able to observe three orthopedic

surgeries that included removal of an osteochondroma, meniscus repair, and ACL and meniscus

repair. Overall it was a really good experience because I was able to see the pre, intra, and post-

op stages. It was not much different from adult surgery but there were a lot more smiles, a few

more people that made the process run a lot smoother and made the patient more comfortable. It

was a really interesting experience but I realized that this unit of pediatrics is not for me. I

observed the role of the nurse and was able to see what role the child life specialist plays in

pediatric surgery. The child life specialist was able to calm the child and the parent. She played a

huge role in describing the procedure to the child in words that they would understand. The age

range of the patients she helped was 2-18. It was really amazing to see her make sure the child

was anxiety free going into the surgery. She saw them in pre-op and followed them all the way

into the operation room.

Staying with the theme of this semester all the cases I saw were adolescent cases. The

first one was an 18-year-old female who had multiple hereditary osteochondroma. This is a

condition that caused her to have multiple bony processes growing all over the bones in her

body. This condition puts the patient at a higher risk of these bony processes being cancerous so

they sent the two that they removed to the lab to be tested. They removed one large and one

small process from the humerus. This particular patient had a history of multiple surgeries like

this one so she wasn’t as anxious as the other teens I saw. Along with this condition this patient

had some mental and emotional disorders. During the surgery she had a timed text go to her
sister saying that she died. This caused a lot of worry for the family and the surgery staff

immediately addressed it. It was really interesting to see them deal with a situation such as this

and I think they handled it really well.

The other two surgeries were knee surgeries. The second surgery I saw was on a 17-year-

old male who played football. He had injured his knee 3 years ago and just now got it fixed

because he was scared of the surgery before. The staff did a really good job of calming him

because he was quite nervous. During the surgery it was really interesting to watch because it

was a laparoscopic procedure and they used a lot of really amazing tools to stabilize the

meniscus. The final surgery I observed was an ACL repair and another meniscal repair. This

surgery was highly interesting because they actually had to replace the ACL and in order to do

this they take the hamstring and bacillus tendon and sew them together to make a new ACL. All

in all it was a really good day and a good experience.