What the Heck! Surgery Tools With Funny Names

A “whirly bird” in an operating room sounds like a joke, until you hear what it actually does to pull bone back into alignment. We kick off a fast, playful game where orthopedic traumatologist Dr. Kate shares real surgical instrument names and comedian Seth Hayes tries to pronounce them and guess their meaning, then we unpack the real-world trauma surgery behind the punchlines.

Along the way, we translate orthopedic jargon into clear visuals: minimally invasive plate fixation of the tibia, why a flexible Gigli saw exists, and how a femoral distractor uses pins and a threaded rod to apply serious, controlled force when dealing with complex fractures like tibial plateau injuries and acetabulum fractures in the hip joint. We also get into the surprisingly deep world of “just scissors” and “just forceps,” including why Debakey forceps pair with electrocautery to clamp and cauterize bleeding vessels when you’re working in tight, deep surgical spaces.

Then we go big on one of the most important advances in fracture care: the intramedullary nail. Dr. Kate explains what it is, the memorable history behind early nail designs, and why modern intramedullary fixation can replace weeks of traction with stability that helps patients get up and walk sooner. We finish with a practical, step-by-step overview of how a nail goes inside a bone through small incisions using a starting wire, guide wire, reaming, mallet seating, and interlocking bolts.

If you like medicine that’s accurate, funny, and easy to picture, subscribe, share this with a friend who loves health and comedy, and leave a review. Which tool name fooled you most?

THANKS TO OUR GUESTS:

Dr Kate: orthopaedic trauma surgeon, hockey player

Seth Kays: filmmaker, writer, actor, comedian, podcast host

IG @sethkaysofficial @manmademediaco @moviewarspodcast

TT @moviewarspodcast X @MovieWarsPod FB TheMovieWarsPodcast YT @moviewarspodcast www.moviewarspodcast.com https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/movie-wars/id1560698102

Subscribe wherever you listen, share this with a friend and leave a review so more people can find honest conversations about healthcare and a little comedy along the way.

This episode was produced by Angie Debelak with post-production editing by Ben Hill Sound.

Thanks for listening to Dr Ben and Friends.  Laughter is the best medicine...unless you're treating bowel or bladder incontinence.  See you next time!

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Transcript

Welcome And The Premise

Dr Ben 0:10

All right, folks. Dr. Ben here. Welcome to the Dr. Ben and Friends podcast. Where together we put the med in comedy. Med in comedy. Today we're celebrating healthcare heroes and pro comics who help make our lives healthier and funnier. My guests today are orthopedic traumatologist Dr. Kate.

Dr Kate 0:30

Hello.

Meet The Surgeon And Comic

Dr Kate 0:31

Thanks for having me.

Seth Kays and Dr Ben 0:32

And filmmaker, writer, comedian, musician, Seth Kays. Ready for what the heck? All right. This segment, what the heck. Uh Dr. Kate here is going to show Mr. Seth here, a word that uh she uses uh every day in the operating room. And Mr. Seth is gonna pronounce the word and tell us what he thinks it means. And uh we're gonna play what the heck. So Dr. Kate uses some cool tools in the operating room. She's like a carpenter sometimes. The bone constructor. The bone constructor, yeah.

Dr Kate 1:08

I mean that's a that's a actually true statement.

Seth Kays and Dr Ben 1:13

Factual and Jason Straight them in. I'm the bone constructor.

Dr Kate 1:18

Really fun when I actually work on carpenters and they're like, yeah, I get it.

Dr Ben 1:22

I get it. All right.

How The “What The Heck” Game Works

Dr Kate 1:25

Today is special. Dr. Kate here uses really cool tools to help patients. Today, these words and terms relate to her tools and instruments. All right.

Whirly Bird Plate Fixation Explained

Dr Ben 1:36

Are you ready for your first word?

Seth Kays 1:37

A whirly bird. Okay, whirly bird.

Dr Ben 1:39

Is this a real instrument?

Seth Kays and Dr Ben 1:41

I mean, I wouldn't so I would I would assume it is because like I'm feeling made up. I mean, everything's made up. All words are made up.

Dr Ben 1:50

Is that someone's name? Another eponym.

Seth Kays and Dr Kate 1:53

Whirly bird. I mean, I'm assuming it twists onto something or at least twists something together. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That's that's that's that's all I mean. You know what?

Dr Kate 2:01

I'm like almost gonna give that to you. Let's give it to them. Uh so yeah, it's a um uh a very specific instrument that is used when you're uh uh trying to do um kind of like percutaneous fixation of oftentimes a tibia. Um so you're making a small incision to put this really big long plate um down the side of the tibia. And sometimes the the shaft maybe a little bit the angle is just not right. Okay. So you put the whirly bird in, and what you do is you drill uh through the plate uh and then through the bone, and then you twist the um uh the drill segment and it pulls the bone towards the plate to get it back in line.

Seth Kays 2:43

Such a fun sounding word for such a awful sounding procedure.

Dr Kate 2:47

Yeah, yeah. But essentially it's a percutaneous way to again reduce the bone or get it back to where it needs to be.

Seth Kays 2:54

And here I thought it was that thing that you ride at the carnival that sticks you to the wall as it's spinning around. It also still might be that big.

Dr Ben 3:00

Do you think the whirly bird gets the worm?

Seth Kays 3:03

Uh I would uh, you know, may I think it's more into crickets.

Dr Ben 3:06

Okay.

Seth Kays 3:06

Yeah. Because I feel like the whirly birds going out like right at sunset. So it's like, yeah, we're we're going out.

Dr Ben 3:12

Like opposite of the early bird. Exactly.

Dr Ben, Seth Kays, Dr Kate 3:17

It's got glitter on it. Glitter and rhinestones. The whirly bird. All

Gigli Saw And When It’s Used

Dr Ben 3:23

right. We have another word here for you. Ready, listener and Mr. Seth.

Seth Kays and Dr Kate 3:28

A giggly saw. Oh, or is it jiggly saw? It gigli saw. Okay.

Dr Kate 3:32

But as a comic gear, you're allowed to call it a giggly saw.

Seth Kays 3:36

It sounds more fun. Giggly. It sounds like it could make you laugh or shake. Yeah. Yeah. Um it's a saw. I uh it cuts through things. Sure. Probably, probably bone.

Dr Kate 3:48

Okay. Yep. Yeah.

Seth Kays 3:50

Any particular type of bone that it cuts? It does all bones.

Seth Kays and Dr Kate 3:52

All bones. Yeah. Um it's an equal opportunist saw. Yeah, I personally don't use these very I don't know if you use them very often.

Seth Kays 3:59

I would say uh she prefers the ones that make you laugh, not the ones that make you jiggle.

Dr Kate 4:03

Right. Um, but there it's essentially like a a hand saw. Okay. It looks like a a metal rope, essentially. Yeah. And you go back and forth.

Dr Ben 4:12

Uh maybe in amputations or oh no.

Dr Ben, Seth Kays, Dr Kate 4:15

Yes, maybe in like the 1800s. Um, but uh oftentimes it's used. Uh I think our recon friends use it a lot in trying to get uh like well cemented or well fixed stems out of femoral canals. Um wells and canals, like yeah, right. Yeah. So it's kind of a less invasive. A lot of water in surgery. Yeah, yeah.

Dr Ben 4:37

Gigli, so I like a giggly.

Seth Kays 4:40

Yeah.

Dr Ben 4:40

All right. All

Femoral Distractor For Tough Fractures

Dr Ben 4:42

right.

Seth Kays 4:42

Next we have a femoral distractor. Oh. I mean, clearly, this is when you need to sneak up on a bone and you need to make it look in another direction and be like, yeah.

Dr Ben, Seth Kays, Dr Kate 4:56

Smoke and mirrors. Look over your femur. You're not broken, you're fine.

Dr Ben 5:00

What is the femur? What bone is that?

Seth Kays 5:01

Uh that's a leg bone. That's the big leg bone. The big leg bone. Yes. That's the one that they say if you break it hurts worse than than giving birth. Wow.

Dr Kate 5:09

I bet men say that.

Seth Kays 5:10

Maybe. Uh all I know is in theory that is the most pain a human being can fit can feel is if you break your femur in half.

Dr Ben 5:17

That's why they need to be distracted. Yeah. Exactly.

Dr Kate 5:19

Yeah. Yeah. They're like, it's not broken. Yeah.

Dr Ben 5:22

What is a femoral distractor?

Dr Kate 5:23

Yeah. So it's uh uh a simple machine is kind of how I would describe it. So you take these big pins um and you put it. Uh I I tend to use it when I'm doing tibial plateau fractures or when I'm doing acetabulum fractures.

Dr Ben 5:38

Um What's the acetabulum?

Dr Kate 5:40

Is the the hip joint. So the cup, the cup of the hip joint. So sometimes when the hip joint breaks, um a piece of uh the joint actually gets stuck inside of the joint. And so I use it to pull uh the the hip joint or distract the hip joint. Um and so you put one of these big five millimeter pins in the femur, one into the kind of the higher end of the the pelvis. Um, and uh you kind of lock everything in, and then you just spin a wheel um using, I call it a hockey stick.

Seth Kays 6:14

Nice.

Dr Kate and Dr Ben 6:15

Uh because it looks like a hockey stick. She's a professional hockey player, um uh but it's essentially a threaded rod, and you're um uh you're just spinning the rod and it's bringing things open, open, open. So it's a very powerful, simple machine. Okay, uh, because it takes a lot of force to distract a hip. Um and it just allows it to hold there. You can look inside the joint, you can use a clamp, perhaps even a burlisher clamp, uh, to get in there, um, grab a piece, um, uh wash it out and make sure that you're not missing anything.

Dr Ben 6:42

So a lot of times, I think for this one, originally, like the femur bone, if it's broken in two pieces, will be shortened or overlapping. And to try to get them to where they need to go, you'd put a pin on either side and distract or pull it apart so the two pieces that sounds horrible.

Seth Kays 6:59

That sounds so painful.

Dr Kate 7:03

Yeah.

Dr Ben 7:03

Yeah. All right. Do we have another

Mayo Scissors And Tool Overload

Dr Ben 7:07

word for Mr. Seth?

Seth Kays 7:08

I got it. Mayo scissors. I'm assuming these were created by the clinic or or by the sauce.

Dr Kate 7:16

Right.

Dr Ben 7:16

The salad dressing helm's folks.

Seth Kays 7:18

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And uh, I mean, I guess this is what you use to like, because I don't know if people know this, but when you squeeze mayo out of the tube, it comes in one long tube, so you gotta scissor it out. Cut it in segments.

Dr Kate 7:30

Yeah, yeah.

Dr Ben 7:31

Get that cupie cut. Do you use these at lunch or in the operating room?

Dr Kate 7:34

Yeah, all day long. All day mayonnaise is an all-day affair. Um, yeah, they're just scissors. I guess what you just like everything in the operating room has to have like a name, but it's because there's different types of scissors. So these are like your scissors, yeah, these are your suture-cutting scissors. Okay. Uh, not to be confused with uh the tenotomies scissors. Okay. Not to be confused with the Metzenbaum scissors, not to be confused with the bandage uh scissors, which are the ones that we take the drive.

Dr Ben 8:07

So many scissors.

Dr Kate 8:07

Yeah, yeah.

Dr Ben 8:08

And they're straight and curved scissors, okay, just to confuse things. So yeah, a guy threw a jar of mayonnaise at me the other day, and I looked at him and said, What the hell, man? Mano scissors. All right.

Seth Kays 8:23

Ah, funniest man in Nashville, y'all.

Dr Ben 8:26

Listener's probably like, how did he win? It wasn't material like that, listener. How does Must have been a slow competition. All right. We have another

Debakey Forceps And Stopping Bleeding

Dr Kate 8:38

word for speaking of the million types of scissors we have. Oh, here we go. There's another option.

Seth Kays 8:42

The debakey forceps. Okay. Household name. These are these are when you've gone through a debacle. Okay. And and you've got you've got one of those, oh, what are they? The the praying mantises and their forceps are are you're in the debacle because you're in the forceps of the praying mantis and he's eating you. Yeah. Or she.

Speaker 9:01

Yeah.

Seth Kays 9:02

Yeah.

Dr Ben 9:03

Debacle.

Dr Kate and Dr Ben 9:04

I kind of might start calling them the debacle. I like it. Yeah. Because you you do use them in in a lot of cases when you're in a debacle. Uh they are debakey. Debakey.

Dr Kate 9:13

Debakey forceps. Uh but they are uh forceps, they don't, they um are kind of smooth forceps. Um, so you use them to grab blood vessels and cauterize them. So we use electrocautery in surgery. Um, uh, which um so you can hold the four the forceps will hold the blood vessel, and your assistant can touch the back of the forceps because it's all uh conducting through your forceps. Okay. Um the back of your forceps. So if you're in a really deep hole, like you're not gonna get the electrocautery all the way down there. Okay. You can grab it with the forceps, and then uh they can cauterize the blood vessel for you.

Seth Kays 9:50

See, I prefer de baker biceps. Because those bakers, they got big old biceps. Yeah, they gotta move so much dough around.

Dr Kate 9:57

But then again, you know, to the point of the scissors, like there's eight hundred different types of forceps. So you got your adsin, you got your Bonnies, you got your rat tooths, you got all sorts of different so yeah, we use in surgery this instrument called a bovey.

Dr Ben 10:12

I don't know if you've heard of the bovey, but it helps kind of seal tissue and stop bleeding and stuff.

Seth Kays 10:16

Okay.

Dr Ben 10:16

And so interestingly, when I first met my wife, she was most impressed by the way I used the bovey. And I know it doesn't sound a lot like a lot, but that's actually how I caught her eyes.

Speaker 3 10:28

Did you just come up with that?

Dr Ben 10:33

The bovie. That's how I cauterize. All right.

Intramedullary Nail And Its Origins

Dr Kate 10:35

So this will probably be good for uh this will probably be good for the last one here.

Seth Kays 10:39

Uh intramul medule oh I almost had it. Intra medullier medul medollary. Intra medullary nail. Okay. So clearly this is so intra is within instead of inter, because intranational is within. So clearly nail that is supposed to be within a bone, I'm assuming.

Dr Kate 11:03

Very good. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So bones, bones are hollow. Um uh it's called the medullary canal.

Seth Kays 11:10

Filled with marrow. Yes. The tastiest part of the cow.

Dr Kate 11:13

Yes. Yeah. I know a lot of people actually I've had patients be like, well, isn't that where all my because I tell them, I mean, I'm gonna put it down center of their bone, but isn't that where my um all my blood vessels or my blood cells are made? I'm like, well, yes, but no. And you have other bones doing it. Yeah, your spine actually does a lot of the uh uh blood cell production. Um but yeah, so this is uh a titanium rod uh that goes down the center of your bone. Okay, um, usually with a femur, uh tibia, you can use them in the long bones. Yeah, in the humerus as well. Um, and essentially it holds the bone in place while it's healing.

Seth Kays 11:51

Okay.

Dr Kate 11:51

So it's really um probably one of the biggest technology um leaps in orthopedics. Uh this was they actually it's really interesting story. So Germany was the first country to actually create intramedullary nails. It's called the Kuncher nail. Um, and so we had uh soldiers coming back from you know being prisoners of war.

Seth Kays 12:12

Yeah.

Dr Kate 12:12

Um, and they were found to have these rods in the center of their bones. And uh a lot of people thought it was torture devices when in fact they were just trying to help them out. Yeah. Um, uh, but essentially instead of keeping patients in uh uh bed traction, which uh means you have either a pin in the part of your femur, it's called skeletal traction or uh or a specialized boot on your leg that's holding weight off the end of the bed to keep your bone out to length and in line. Used to peep treat people for six weeks like that. All right, when these imagine yeah, six weeks. And now you put one of these intramendullary rods in or intramandullary nails, um, the patients can walk that same day.

Seth Kays 12:53

So I actually have a friend who got hit by a car back in September, and I'm pretty sure she had some of those put in.

Dr Kate 12:58

Yes, yeah, yeah. And you know, I tell people they're not gonna want to run a marathon tomorrow. Yeah, but at least they all did, but getting people up and out of bed.

Dr Ben 13:06

Yeah, weight bear right away.

Dr Kate 13:07

Yep, and uh kind of away from the risks of being supine for long periods of time. You're worried about skin issues, pulmonary issues, yeah. Um, and really, really, really important in our elderly folks that we get them up uh immediately after surgery. So yeah.

Dr Ben 13:20

Dr.

How A Nail Goes Inside Bone

Dr Ben 13:21

Kate, tell the listener, how do you get a nail inside a bone? They're probably wondering. Yeah, is this like some magic trick?

Dr Kate and Dr Ben 13:26

Or kind of you have to use a distraction like don't look over here. Yeah. Um for my next trick. Yeah, so we we make really small incisions actually. So I probably make uh, you know, if I'm putting a femoral nail in, uh three centimeter incision, um, kind of uh up by the flank buttock area. And what you do is um uh you start with a starting wire. All right, so you get it at the correct start point. I'm not gonna go into that, but you take your time. That's one of the most important parts of the cases, is getting the correct start point. Um, and then you use what's called a reamer to open up the bone um uh to get access into the canal. You put what's called a ball-tipped guide wire down the center of the bone to the correct end point, so correct starting point, correct end point. And then you open up the center of the canal a little bit with what are called reamers. And what that does is um it takes uh um let's say maybe your canal was nine millimeters, and I'll open it up to about 11 and a half. That allows you to increase this the diameter of the um the nail that you're putting in, which increases the stiffness. Um and in certain nails that we use allows you to use bigger interlocking bolts, which are the bolts that the patients are actually walking on while the bone is healing. Um, and so yeah, you you uh ream to the size that you want, usually about a millimeter and a half above the planned size of the nail. And then you put the nail over the guide wire and you use the mallet and you whack, whack, whack, whack, whack until it is in the correct position. And then you lock it proximally with some bolts, lock it distally with some bolts, and that uh allows people to walk on it.

Seth Kays 15:06

There we go.

Dr Kate 15:07

Yeah, yeah.

Seth Kays and Dr Ben 15:07

So this is going all the way from your top of your hip to your knee, essentially, down by your kneecap through little incisions. It's a long nail.

Dr Kate 15:15

It's yeah. I would say for an average adult male, it's between 400 and 420 millimeters.

Dr Ben 15:22

Wow.

Seth Kays 15:22

Perfectly average.

Dr Kate 15:23

Yeah.

Dr Ben 15:24

Whereas if you were to do that with like plates and screws, it's a bigger incision. They can't walk on it necessarily right away.

Dr Kate 15:29

Yeah, I mean, if if you have to and there are certain scenarios, like let's say a patient has a total hip and you're not able to put an intramedullary nail in, um, you know, you're making an incision from their hip to their knee, uh, and kind of you know, the wrists that come with that versus a three centimeter incision and then several one centimeter incisions to put those interlocking bolts in. So yeah.

Dr Ben, Seth Kays, Dr Kate 15:51

Wow. So yeah. And you did a great job with the pronunciation. Thank you. Amazing. A lot of people in the medical field have uh struggled pronouncing these words. Yeah. Like during the timeout. Yes. I hear a lot of variations of wait, what am I doing again?

Dr Kate 16:05

Yeah, I'm like, I don't know. That doesn't sound like what I'm doing.

Seth Kays 16:08

My philosophy with everything is fake it till you make it. If you say anything with enough confidence, people will be like, that's really good. It's wrong, but that was really good.

Dr Kate 16:16

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like I said, I'm gonna use the debacle probably.

Final Laughs And Wrap Up

Dr Ben 16:22

All right, folks. That was what the heck? How did you do? Did you know any of those words, listener? All right, folks.

Speaker 3 16:37

Dr. Ben and Friend