Week Five Day One: What Defines a Complication?

Today in the office, we sadly had no patients who had the spinal fusion surgery that I have been studying, but that didn't stop me from trying to think of ways to improve my project and my data collection. The term complication is very broad, and (when using google) is described as:

A circumstance that complicates something; a difficulty

This by no means isn't true, but does not fit my project or give me any basis of trying to decided whether or not something that happened following spinal fusion is a complication or not. So, for my project, I describe it as:

An unexpected result of spinal fusion surgery

This has worked for the patients I have seen so far, but through data mining from reliable medical publications, I have realized that there can be some "unexpected results" that actually are not harmful (which was what I originally had in mind for this project) such as the degree of curvature decreasing past the expected amount, or a patient growing more than the doctor had expected. 

This has led me to have to try and mold the definition around to try and make my project and research more clear. Now I have formed the definition to be:

An unexpected and unwanted result of spinal fusion surgery.

This rules out the sort of "positive" and unexpected results of the surgery. 

That data I have collected so far says that out of the kids who had preoperative conditions, 2/4 of them had complications. The data so far is small, but I plan to talk to Dr. Shindell about some patients with complications that he knows, as well as using some data mining from outside resources.