There were two emergency patients living in one room in the ward, one suffering from “appendicitis” and the other also diagnosed with “appendicitis” and admitted to the hospital. The former had a 2cm wound and the latter had a 20cm wound; the former had two stitches and the operation took 20 minutes and was discharged on the fifth day after the operation; the latter had a dozen stitches and the operation took two hours and he barely went home after ten days. The latter had more than a dozen stitches and a two-hour operation. The latter could not understand it, and had an opinion about the attending doctor, who thought he had opened the knife badly, or even wrongly.
In fact, when the doctor operated on the latter’s appendicitis, he found that the inflammation of the appendix was not serious, but the cecum and ascending colon were dilated, and the doctor in charge explored upward and unexpectedly found that the patient had a tumor of the ascending colon. The surgery could not be taken as a simple appendectomy, and a right hemicolectomy was required. The surgical incision needed to be extended upward to have enough exposure to ensure the extent of resection and to improve surgical thoroughness and safety. Jianwei Zhu, Department of Gastrointestinal Surgery, Nantong University Hospital
Same site, same disease, different conditions in different patients. It is redundant to measure the length of the wound and count the number of stitches to judge the merits based on this, which is only to observe the surface but not to know the inside. Generally speaking, for benign diseases, the surgical wound will be shorter, but even for the same disease, for example, cholecystectomy for cholecystitis, the surgical incision will be much longer for short, obese, male patients than for tall, thin, female patients. For malignant tumors, the length of the wound should not be taken into consideration, which may cause inconvenience to the thoroughness of the radical treatment, and therefore the surgeon’s level cannot be determined by the length of the wound.