A remarkable incident : Self Surgery

A young Russ­ian sur­geon Leonid Rogo­zov, stranded in  Antarc­tica with the Sixth Soviet Antarc­tic Expe­di­tion, in 1961 per­forms a self-operation: under local anes­the­sia, sur­rounded by a bunch of guys whose only expe­ri­ence with med­i­cine was sit­ting in a dentist’s chair, the 27^th years old doc­tor removes his own appendix.

Leonid Rogo­zov

In his diary he explained the pain he suffered and the process of surgery took place. He stated that he was suffered a lot due to the appendix problems which hurt him like the devil.

All the avail­able con­ser­v­a­tive treat­ment was applied (antibi­otics, local cool­ing), but the gen­eral con­di­tion was get­ting worse.And so the prepa­ra­tions for the surgery began. In his diary  he describes these events in  plain, almost emo­tion­less lan­guage: how the guys found out, how he told them what was about to hap­pen, what they were to do. Fol­low­ing Dr Rogozov’z instruc­tions, the team mem­bers assem­bled an impro­vised oper­at­ing the­atre. They moved every­thing out of the room, leav­ing only the bed, two tables, and a table lamp. The aerol­o­gists Fedor Kabot and Robert Pyzhov flooded the room thor­oughly with ultra­vi­o­let light­ing and ster­ilised the bed linen and instruments.

                             Half way through the oper­a­tion

In the event that Rogo­zov lost con­scious­ness, he instructed his team how to inject him with drugs using the syringes he had pre­pared. Then he gave the main helpers a sur­gi­cal wash him­self, dis­in­fected their hands, and put on their rub­ber gloves for them. And so it began: with the team’s mete­o­rol­o­gist hold­ing the retrac­tors, a dri­ver to hold the mir­ror and other sci­en­tists pass­ing sur­gi­cal imple­ments, he sat in a reclined posi­tion and cut out his own appen­dix under local anesthetic.

 The oper­a­tion went on for two hours

 Once  oper­a­tion was com­plete, he took sleep­ing tablets and lay down for a rest. The next day his tem­per­a­ture was 38.1°C; he described his con­di­tion as “mod­er­ately poor” but over­all he felt bet­ter.  He con­tin­ued tak­ing antibi­otics. After five days his tem­per­a­ture was nor­mal; after a week he removed the stitches. Within two weeks he was able to return to his nor­mal duties and to his diary.

Those very instru­ments — on a museum dis­play nowadays

A remark­able extract from Doctor’s diary:

I worked with­out gloves. It was hard to see. The mir­ror helps, but it also hin­ders — after all, it’s show­ing things back­wards. I work mainly by touch. The bleed­ing is quite heavy, but I take my time — I try to work surely. Open­ing the peri­toneum, I injured the blind gut and had to sew it up. Sud­denly it flashed through my mind: there are more injuries here and I didn’t notice them … I grow weaker and weaker, my head starts to spin. Every 4 – 5 min­utes I rest for 20 – 25 sec­onds. Finally, here it is, the cursed appendage! With hor­ror I notice the dark stain at its base. That means just a day longer and it would have burst and …

At the worst moment of remov­ing the appen­dix I flagged: my heart seized up and notice­ably slowed; my hands felt like rub­ber. Well, I thought, it’s going to end badly. And all that was left was remov­ing the appen­dix …
And then I realised that, basi­cally, I was already saved.

This self oper­a­tion was prob­a­bly the first such suc­cess­ful act under­taken out of hos­pi­tal set­tings, with no pos­si­bil­ity of out­side help, and with­out any other med­ical pro­fes­sional around. It remains an exam­ple of deter­mi­na­tion and the human will for life.