This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantu.
All of us have days when, despite our best efforts, everything just goes wrong.
Sometimes terribly wrong.
It was a devastating problem.
Atul Gawande is a surgeon at Brigham and women's Hospital in Boston.
He's also a writer.
You might have read his work in the New Yorker or in slate.
A few years ago, Atul was at work, operating on a patient he refers to as Mister Hagerman.
I was taking out a tumor of the adrenal gland laparoscopically.
He'd performed this procedure dozens of times before, but this time was particularly tricky.
Mister Hagerman's tumor was behind his liver, nestled tightly against an important blood vessel.
The main blood vessel, returning the blood of the body to the heart.
It's known as the vena cava.
Atul began the surgery, and everything was going smoothly.
He was almost done detaching the tumor, when all of a sudden he nicked the blood vessel.
I ended up creating a hole in the vena cava, which meant that he then pretty quickly lost his entire blood volume into his abdomen.
A complete blackout on the screen and utter chaos.
Atul took the man's heart in his hand and began compressing it to keep blood flowing to his brain.
I mean, he lost basically ten times his body volume and blood, but we were able to give him enough blood to keep his circulation going.