As part of our lab today, I tried suturing for the first time. At first, we practiced with a thin rope. Our goal here was to get the basic square knot down before moving on to using actual suture. Having never sutured before, it wasn’t intuitive and it certainly took a few tries to get the hang of it. For me, the large rope wasn’t helping much, as it was difficult to grab onto with my needle drivers. I didn’t initially understand that I had to pull the rope through and even pull both ends to make a good knot. After a few attempts with the rope, I figured out where I was initially going wrong, and had the square knot down.
After this initial introduction, we moved over to a foam pad, where we used actual suture. The foam pad has preexisting cuts for us to suture up. Or as an alternative, you could make your own cut with a scalpel blade. Having practice suture to use, everything felt more natural and much easier than with a thicker piece of rope. At this point, we added in how to properly handle forceps in our non-dominant hand. I quickly realized that this is where I will need the most work, because I often found myself dropping my forceps, mainly because of how much easier it is to work without them in my hand. Thankfully, we have a couple months to practice suturing and other skills before we are officially tested on them.
