Word: vagina
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Hometown: Discovered by the Germans in 1904, they named it San Diego, which of course in German means a whale’s vagina...
...about heroes in cop action melodramas: when they're young, they're single; when they age a little, they go directly from husband to widower. Ludlow can't cleanse himself of his wife's untimely death. And like any caring, bereft husband, Ludlow wants a DNA swab from her vagina, so he can find and severely hurt the guy she was having sex with when she died. It's these sensitive little subplots that build heart into the machine of the narrative...
Last month, in an American surgical first, doctors at the University of California, San Diego, removed the appendix of a 24-year-old patient through her vagina. Surgeons Santiago Horgan and Mark Talamini made a small incision in the wall of the patient's vagina, through which they passed surgical tools and a small camera to the appendix, removing the organ through the same incision. Surgeons also made a small cut in the bottom of the patient's bellybutton and inserted another camera through it to help guide surgery. The procedure took 50 minutes from start to finish, 20 minutes...
That is the kind of sentiment that proponents of the technique are hoping for. Using patients' natural openings (the mouth, vagina or rectum) as entry points to the body is perhaps the intuitive next step to laparoscopic surgery - which, while significantly less invasive than open surgery, still requires several tiny incisions through the abdominal wall. Cutting through abdominal muscle is not only painful, but can also cause complications: up to 5% of (or 50,000) surgery patients later develop hernias, Horgan estimates. The new technique requires cutting too, but generally just one incision through internal tissue - of the stomach, vagina...
...addition, many patients still have qualms about such procedures. "Speaking with my wife," says Talamani, "the concept of operating through the vagina, was, well, quite foreign to her. That would be a kind way to put it." Dr. Marc Bessler, director of laparoscopic surgery at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, who is conducting a study on transvaginal gallbladder removal, says knee-jerk discomfort with the idea may be keeping patients away. "I was hoping after doing the first few that patients would come looking for this," he says, but they have been slow to arrive. Bessler has thus far removed three...