not for the faint of stomach

I know that some of you don't like hearing about the gross medical
stuff, so those of weaker stomachs should probably skip onto the next
entry. The hospital has undergone some big changes recently, with the
arrival of a generalist from New Zealand who feels comfortable in the
theater and a second surgeon from the states who is here for a little
while to help us all get training better in our surgical experience. So
all of us have been trying to spend some time in the theater to improve
our skills, and my big case this week was an interesting woman who I had
seen earlier in my time here with a baby and a large extra-uterine mass,
which was easily the size of the uterus, if not larger. At the time
that I saw her before, she was too early to do much about the mass, but
now with surgical backup we elected to do a C-section and then remove
the mass. Her stomach was so huge that she could only get up by rolling
to the edge of the bed, swinging her legs over the edge, and then
pulling herself up to a sitting position from the side.
Fortunately, the baby did well, and I managed to scoop out a huge tumor
from her left ovary that was the size of two basketballs and filled with
greenish-brown fluid, as I discovered to my dismay when one of the cysts
popped and spilled all over my shoes. Amazingly, there doesn't seem to
be any spread of this thing to anywhere else, and her post-op course has
been fairly smooth, so maybe we were able to help her. And the baby was
named after the RN who did the anesthesia, too!