This has probably been the busiest week of the Senior Research Project so far, which is why the blog post is so late in the week. I’ve spent a lot of time in the OR and in the office, gathering data, so here’s what I’ve been doing:

On Thursday, I had the opportunity to watch a neurosurgery case! But in order to explain what the case was about, I need to give a little background. When humans are developing, the spinal cord forms all the way into the tail bone, and as the fetus develops more, the spinal cord shortens, so it ends before it reaches the sacrum. In some babies, however, the spinal cord does not shorten, so it extends into the tail bone even after birth. In some cases, babies are born with tails that they can move, since the spinal cord extends into the tail. The baby being operated on did not have a tail, but did have a spinal cord that extended into her tail bone. So the surgeon, Dr. Ruzicka, made an opening in the baby’s back, exposing the spinal cord, which looked like a silvery, translucent cord. He then used a microscope to cut the spinal cord, and only the spinal cord, where it should have ended. He then used the smallest needle the scrub tech could find to stitch the dura mater (the outermost layer of the sheath covering the spinal cord) back together. By watching this case, I also learned that it is imperative that the surgeon has the tools he originally asked for.

While I was in the office, I had the surgeons start doing time trials with the smooth and barbed sutures. Here is a comparison of the two different suture designs:

Both of these sutures are monofilament sutures, so they are made up of only one strand of material (as opposed to multifilament sutures, which are braided).