The Physics of Recovery: Mastering Postoperative complications

Welcome to the postoperative world! Surgery, if you really think about it, is just highly controlled trauma. We intentionally alter the human body to fix a problem, but in doing so, we wage war against physics and physiology. We introduce anesthetic drugs that put vital reflexes to sleep, we open blood vessels and lose fluid, and we ask a human being in pain to lay perfectly still.

Nature, however, hates a vacuum and despises stagnant fluids. Our entire job as nurses is to anticipate the physics of what is about to go wrong and intercept it. Let's break down the beautiful, mechanical reality of postoperative complications and how we outsmart them.