aberrant anatomy

Things are hotting up round here with the construction of the website. In the last three or four weeks I’ve half written two blog entries but just not had time to complete and upload them. Let’s try the one that only made it to a sketch in my head, back at the beginning of May:

I have just finished a stint of work as a sample patient for a bunch of anaesthetists learning to inject anaesthetic with the use of ultrasound. This did not involve either being injected or being anaesthetised, but I did get to see rather a lot of my own insides.

You see, when an anaesthetist injects, they are aiming either into the vein or very close to the nerve (depending on what body part they have to anaesthetise) – but the veins, the nerves and the arteries all sit very close to each other. Miss the vein, and the patient will not sleep. Hit the nerve and you could kill the limb… for good. Get the tip of the needle not quite between the required fascial planes and you’ll numb either the wrong part or nothing much. Hit the artery and you get all sorts of nastiness, up to and including death. It’s all a matter of millimetres and – here’s the real crunch – no two bodies are exactly the same. Most people are more or less according to the anatomy textbooks; about 20% are not. Really, it’s amazing they don’t have more failures than they do, since up until recently they’ve been working blind.

But in the last decade or so, with advances in computer technology, they’ve begun to use ultrasound imaging to actually look where they’re going in a body as they put the needle in – a revolution in knockout jobs. The black and white image of veins, arteries, bones, organs, muscles, etcetera, that comes up on the screen is difficult to read until you know what you’re looking at/for, hence the need to conduct workshops and hire body models to sit around all day being coated in ultrasound gel.

And I have to say, it was truly fascinating, because often I could see the screen and follow the tutorial with the medicos, and I learned a lot, not only about the science of anaesthesia and the character of anaesthetists (modest, mild-mannered and moderate is my impression) but about my own internal layout. On the right side, I am pretty much according to the text books. On the left, however, I am an anaesthetist’s nightmare. I have two femoral arteries, two brachial arteries, and the brachial nerve plexus branches early, before the groove into which the anaesthetic is normally injected to numb the arm, so to get a proper block the aberrant branch would have to be numbed by injecting the muscle it passes through. Originally, I also had an os trigonum on the left side, an extra bone in the ankle joint, but it was removed while I was with the Australian Ballet (extra bones in dancers’ ankles are a real nuisance). My conclusion about all this, given what else I know of my heredity, is that my mother was a normal human being but my father is most probably an alien.