When doctors are stitching up a particularly bad split or cut, do you think they're muttering "Ew! Gross!" under their breath the whole time?

No, only in the really extreme cases. You would be surprised how seeing some gawd awful things just becomes routine after a rotation in the ER.

A friend earned his MD at USC School of Medicine, which uses LA County General as its teaching hospital. The ER there is one of the busiest taruma centers anywhere.

No. They get erections instead.

No. I think they’re thinking “this is a bad one. I have to be methodical.”

No. It’s routine. Unless there are maggots in the wound, or something. That is not routine. But even then, they are probably wondering, as are the nurses, under what conditions the patient is living.

The one time I saw a doctor balk for a moment, was when a man was gurnied into the ER after having fallen face-first into a spinning boat propeller while rinsing an outboard motor out under power. That was bad, there was only a porting of the face pushed aside, white bone fragments and hamburger where the rest of his face should have been and the patient was still conscious. But what you describe above is an everyday occurrence.

Gross!

Ew!

I think it would be oh wow! Queasiness would be screened out in med school.

It was screened out of me without med school!

I looked at your picture @Dutchess_III and thought, “Oh! Okay!” I’d have made a good doctor I think. I’ve cleaned up too much blood to be grossed out by stuff like that.

It was an awesome mess wasn’t it. Hope they can put the tattooed back together.

NSFW. I had to do two dissections Once In grade 9 science and once in grade twelve biology . I refused. I wasn’t squeamish. I thought that the frog and fetal pigs should be alive and not murdered. I’ve seen my insides before from falling from a tree and getting my side ripped open. I’m not scared of blood.

@RedDeerGuy1 Good for you for refusing !!!

People who work with that sort of thing probably think “That’s interesting, lets see how close I can get it back to it’s original condition.”

I think only in very extreme cases.

Anyway, that is a beautiful wound. I would like to poke around in it.

It’s not the blood and gore that bothers people after awhile. It’s the screaming, writhing and agony before the morphine takes effect that I never got used to. Especially with children.

My son wound up with a huge gash in his head from a snowboard accident when he was about 12. Talk about a mess. Cleaned it up, assessed it, and decided it needed stitches. Took him in to the ER. He was screaming and crying and carrying on so badly that the nurse got so flustered and upset that she kept dropping stuff. The doctor finally kicked her out, and put me in charge of handing him the stuff he needed. None of it fazed me a bit. It did the first couple of times though, when he was 2 and 3. He wound up with stitches every damn year for the first 5 years of his life, the clutz.

I think a doc could probably handle about anything. Not so some other folks. I’m not too squeamish myself, unless I’m the one who is injured. I got a pretty nasty slash on the back with a knife once (long story), and when my girlfriend got me to the ER, she said it looked real nasty and asked if I wanted her to try to show it to me in her compact mirror. I told her hell no, and then the ER Staff ushered her out until they stitched me up. I’d have probably passed out, but I never had to look at it. Blood only bothers me if it’s mine.

I was briefly acquainted with a pro baseball pitcher who managed to cut fingers off of his pitching hand with a table saw. Dumbass. I was at my hand doctor’s the other day and lo. There was a signed and framed picture of Koyie in the reception area. He had signed it “Thank you for sewing my life back together.” I mentioned it to the doc when I saw it.
To hear Koyie tell it, he was calm as a cucumber, carrying his fingers in to the ER in a towel.
Not quite so, according to the doctor!

LOL I’ll bet! I can guarantee I would have had to be sedated. Heavily. To hell with that macho BS.

The story is quite amazing though. Doc stitched his fingers back on so they created a permanent curve so he could pitch. I never even noticed it in class, until I read about it. The next day I went in and demanded to see his hand.
I suddenly had a whole lot of faith in my new hand doctor.