This is how I get my daily chuckle–reading this forum. What a gas!
FYI: @marmak3261 since I was a tad worried that this shaped mandrel will not allow sliding of the silicone to remove it at the end, it is printed in PVA so we can dissolve it if worse comes to worse (although that would be a bummer since it’s reusable). I am hesitant to try mold release compound on it, since I suspect that will cause failure of the spinning part to adhere…
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For those not on your anatomy this is your ascending colon (the part that attaches to the small bowel, at the hole you see right near the corner of the dump bucket) and the 3/8" flange is where your cecum/appendix are).
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Try rolling the silicone off the master. Hint: dust it with talcum powder so it doesnt stick to itself. If that doesnt work, wet it with 91% isopropyl alcohol (it’s slippery) and hopefully that won’t attack your master too badly.
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Another day another colon…
By the way, walk around a hospital with a colon-on-a-stick for comic relief…
So today we had a blast trying the spinning mandrel technique with the Colonopsicle from above. Unfortunately I had to delete the soundtrack of the video since I seem to remember profanity being against policy here on the forums, because the hilarity of trying this insanity with ultra fast curing silicone while everything was rapidly spinning was beyond crazy.
At one point my colleague over-zetsed the trigger on the drill and we were pretty sure we were going to get spattered like a dog shaking off mud…
So first a few pics of the process:
The setup (the drill is gaffer’s taped to the table). Threaded rod needs to be WAAAAAY shorter…
closeup of the smoothed silicone curing
Inside is flawless (that is the ileocecal valve showing at right). This stuff is incredible at taking a mold, since the lines you see are the 0.2mm lines from the 3D printed part!
The colon transilluminates like a real colon (if you do an intraoperative colonoscopy you see the room lights showing through the wall). Note the end was more closed as he had already thrown some stitches at the end…
So first my colleague Tom threw a few hand sutures in and then we loaded it on one of our laparoscopic trainers in the simulation center
This version has a way higher fidelity versus the prior one, with no drag on the needle as it goes through; he commented it felt very realistic. He did comment the silicone was “too grippy” as real colons are somewhat slippery, so we went off to colorectal clinic and he asked the nurse for a tube of very slippery barrier cream, hands it to me and says “put that on your colon to lube it up”, which got me some really, really strange looks from the nurses… Luckily had the fake colon with me…
To view the hilarity (I was going to speed it up, but figured you could skip to portions easily enough):
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As you can see it slid right off (well it didn’t because one of the tied sections of power mesh we broke the thin little cords we made so in desperation due to the impending cure, we used a thick section which I couldn’t stretch - I did eventually pull it over, but snapped the shaft off which led to more profanity and giggling)
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Nice, just a little scared seeing a colon connected to a cordless drill 
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The jokes were flying, let me tell you. Medical personnel already have a pretty low-brow sense of humor, and do something like this, and…
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Now that…just looks…oh nevermind.
Really, it’s wonderful to see you pushing back the frontiers of medical science every day!
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Yep, that was part of the deleted audio track… 
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Oh and when my colleague from urology walked by… more reasons for soundtrack deletion…
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I learned a long time ago to never start swapping stories with doctors, policemen, paramedics orfiremen unless I was truly prepared for it 
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holy crap! that is one big colon.
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Well, sure! If it was any smaller it’d only be a semi-colon. 
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that’s the closest I could find to a groan emoji
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Actually about midsize. The colon near your cecum (right side, where this is) is 65-80mm in diameter. We don’t freak until it’s ~150mm in diameter (megacolon) which is life threatening. Down in the descending colon (left side) it is around 35-45mm in diameter.
for the brave, this is what this is modeled on (this specific colon)…
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Yes, that’s what we call V2 jokingly, as the case was with a hemi-colon, which is V3 (that’s the actual term - the surgery is a semi-colectomy)…
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The picture reaffirms that I am as ruined as any medical professional, I viewed it while eating breakfast and was all " so that is what the appendix looks like".
On the other hand, I am kinda freaked by the realization that the colon is divided up the same way a quaver is in music. The only difference is the quaver goes all the way to hemi-demi-semi-quaver.
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Well technically each part has a name:
starting at the ileocecal valve:
Cecum (with appendix)
Ascending colon
Transverse colon
Descending colon
Sigmoid colon
Rectum (rectum? damned near kilt em!)
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When I made an appointment for an endoscopy and a colonoscopy at the same time I requested that they do the endoscopy first if they were going to be using the same tool for both. The scheduler was not amused.
I woke up just before the colonoscopy was done and watched a bit of myself on the screen for a minute or two. Very odd sensation when you are still partially under. I’ve always wondered if the scheduler had something to do with that.
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