On my last day of gen surg, I scrubbed in on a case involving a guy in his 50s in the ICU who had become more and more hemodynamically unstable overnight. The team had also noticed that his abdomen had gotten noticeably distended overnight. All clinical signs pointed to a GI bleed, but there was no clear reason for him to be bleeding and an abdominal x-ray was normal. Since he was continuing to become more and more unstable, he was brought down to the OR for an exploratory laparotomy.
As the surgeon makes the first incision through the final tissue layer into the abdomen, a huge amount of blood starts gushing out. It fills the field, floods over the table, and completely soaks the surgeon and a good chunk of my legs. After 45 seconds or so there's a huge puddle of blood on the floor and using a bunch of gauze the surgeon managed to stop the bleeding. He starts exploring the abdomen and finds a small vessel supplying the mesentery (essentially fat around the bowels) which had for some reason ruptured. Presumably it ruptured the previous evening and had been bleeding all night. He clamps off the vessel, closes him up, and off he goes.
It was pretty dramatic as both the surgeon and the anesthesiologist gave him a 50-50 chance of surviving the surgery. That was a definitive "you just saved a guy's life" moment. He ended up making a complete recovery.
Pretty cool anecdote.
