What would happen if your surgeon just left in the middle of surgery?

gamer@lemm.ee to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 57 points –

Say you’re having major surgery, like installing some new ribs, and half way through the surgery, while your chest is wide open, the surgeon just leaves. Like he just decides to go home and leave you there.

Eventually you’ll wake up, right? You’ll wake up with your chest open, probably in a lot of pain.

Would you die? If you manage to stay calm and just lie there patiently, how long could you survive? Besides something like an infection, what would be the things that could kill you in that situation?

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Everyone here saying that there would be someone else to stitch you up, I think what OP meant was more of a "everyone in the room vanishes and you're left alone" type of question.

Yep.

And the result would be varying very much depending on the surgery.

Open heart surgery? You're done.

Knee surgery? A good amount of pain, but maybe fine.

‘Fine’ is a stretch. I don’t think I can sew myself good enough to prevent infection and gangrene.

Assuming all the power and filtration systems stay on, you'd actually be in a pretty sterile environment. If you did your best and put a lot of clean bandages on it, I feel like you have a good chance of avoiding infection.