Polite Dissent

Hard Time (Season Two) #5 “Bodies & Souls”
Mary Skrenes and Steve Gerber, writer
Brian Hurtt, artist

Cutter has been badly injured in a prison brawl and has been placed on a cot in the infirmary where the prison doc is performing a nephrectomy (removing his injured kidney).

I realize this is supposed to be an emergency effort to save the injured felon, but they probably should have bundled him off to a real hospital ASAP. They’re likely to do more harm than good in this situation. For example (from head to toe):
1. No anesthesia. He may be a killer and a hardened criminal, but he deserves some anesthesia. (They could be using some intravenous anesthesia like Propofol, but given how delapidated the infirmary seems to be, I think it’s unlikely they’d have such modern medicine. On the other hand, it takes less equipment than inhaled anesthetics).
2. No eye protection on the guy on the left.
3. What’s with the paper towels? The sterile field leaves a lot to be desired. Every time the surgeon leans over, he’s smacking the patient’s hand with his (allegedly) sterile gown,.
4. The kidney is located deep behind the abdomen in an area known as the retroperitoneum. It can be accessed from the back, in which case you need to cut through a few ribs, or from the front, in which case you don’t have to remove any ribs, but you do have to move a heck of a lot of bowel out of the way. They seem to have found a miraculous third way to remove the kidney here.
5. I think I’d restrain Cutter’s feet too, particularly since he didn’t get any anesthesia (see #1).