Today was the day I drove out to Duke’s Raleigh Hospital to attend 3 surgeries throughout the day and follow Dr. McElveen through his operation schedule. I’ll admit I was anxious walking in, but once I had thrown on my scrubs and sat down for the first surgery, the moment it started the anxiety turned into curiosity, and the curiosity into interest.
I cannot disclose too much about the operations I attended out of respect for the families, nor can my pictures be of the live scene as that is again disrespectful, but I was able to get my hands on some of the actual pictures taken by Dr. McElveen through the microscope, and I must say here and now that if you the reader are squeamish or opposed to blood, you definitely should stop reading this or look away. The following pictures will be followed by text for a little more in-depth understanding.
Again, I’m warning you. Stop here if you don’t really want to see the pictures and the explanation.
So, the first surgery, from which these pictures came, was an operation to insert a cochlear implant for a patient whose hearing had been fully lost. A cochlear implant in one very simplified sentence is basically a hearing aid that is inserted into the skull and connected to the cochlear nerve to stimulate it to once again create functioning hearing. For the patient above, a large incision was made behind the ear to begin, and the skin was pulled open to reveal the back of their skull. In particular, the part of the skull being worked on above is called the mastoid bone and is located at the base of the skull behind the ear. Once they removed the periosteum, or the membrane covering the skull, in the operation area, they brought out a bone drill and began to form the hole pictured above. After what felt like a lot of drilling, passing through the corrugated midsection of the mastoid, the drill finally punctured through into the inner ear, and what had effectively happened was that by going through the bone, they had circumvented the eardrum, therefore allowing them to leave it unharmed for further use. After puncturing into the inner ear cavity, they found the cochlear nerve, one of the four in the inner ear cavity, and made a small incision into which they placed one of the electrodes of the cochlear implant. After ingraining the finger-sized implant a space big enough to fit into the bone of the mastoid, they inserted the implant and then released the skin hooks and sewed the patient’s incision closed. In the end, even though the hole in the skull pictured above looks large and intrusive, the amount of skull bone removed would be unnoticeable to the patient and the scar was quite thin and hard to notice. And besides, the patient now again has functional hearing, which I’m sure anyone would take if the consequence was a thin scar behind the ear. After that operation had ended, I went on to watch two more, from which I don’t have any pictures. They were both tympanoplasties, which is the reconstruction of an eardrum through grafted skin and cartilage. They were as well very interesting, and each operation was done expertly well and quickly by Dr. McElveen and his nurse team. Overall, today was very interesting and educational and I am very thankful to Dr. McElveen and all of the patients for their graciousness in allowing me to attend these surgeries.