Robert Whitfield MD explains how surgeons remove infected or cancerous tissue without spilling contents. He describes the technique as removing something 'like an Easter egg' to keep the shell intact, and discusses a patient with a culture-positive E. coli infection.
So for everybody listening, I take things out like an Easter egg and try to keep everything intact. I don't want to break the shell. I don't want to spill what's inside, because if that's inside somebody who has an infection, that's going to spread it, if it's got a cancer in it, which obviously, in patients who've had cancer before, you don't want to spread that. So there's all sorts of things that are a checklist in my head that I go through when I take care of those patients. And now, for explat patients, I run the similar checklist, if you want to think of that way. So that patient had on their culture results an E. Coli infection. And so people will say, well, how did you get that? Was that from the time of surgery?
