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Surgery lesson #465: Never do a tonsillectomy with a hernia tray.
Back in the early 2010s, I spent a few weeks as a surgeon at a rural hospital in Haiti. I’m betting you can picture the place: dedicated staff, terrible infrastructure, overcrowded wards, and beautifully green outdoor covered walkways.
On my second-to-last day there, a six-year-old girl presented to our outpatient clinic with chronic sore throats, massively enlarged tonsils, and bad sleep apnea. She couldn’t have had a more textbook indication for a tonsillectomy.
Since there were no ENTs scheduled for another six months, we got her on the OR schedule for the next day.
Anywhere in the world, ORs keep instrument sets for common procedures. Meaning, if a surgeon wants to fix a hernia, she doesn’t have to go into the instrument room to pick which scissors, retractors, needle holders, etc, she might need. All she has to do is request a hernia tray, and, 90% of the time, every instrument she needs is there.
Because this particular hospital rarely saw ENT patients, they didn’t have a tonsil tray—no pre-packed set of surgical instruments to do a tonsillectomy. And that meant that, right after clinic was done, the OR staff asked me to go through their…
