OR Oddities

OR’s are strange places ! Here are a few things that I discovered on my recent General Surgery observership that took me by surprise:

• It doesn’t take very long to scrub-in. In fact when you live just three minutes’ walk from the hospital like I do, it’s entirely possible to go from relaxing on your couch in jeans and a sweater one minute to scrubbed-in within the sterile field of an OR just fifteen minutes later. You can come back out again even faster!
• The majority of your scrubs don’t stay sterile – it’s really just your hands and forearms, hence why surgeons are so careful to hold their hands out in front of them where they won’t touch any other part of your body.
• As a member of the surgical team, you may not see the patient’s face until after the surgery (assuming it’s not a facial surgery!). The surgical nurses and anaesthetists arrive long before the surgeons to prepare the patient. Once prepared, the patient’s face is normally hidden behind a protective shield.
• Scrubs have a very inconveniently placed hole in the fabric just below the waistline, on the side of the hip. The result is that you can always see whatever kind of underwear anyone is wearing. The team will even discuss it openly: “Oh, you wore your pink ones today!”
• There are CD-players in the OR. How appropriate it is to have Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic” playing as the surgeon makes the first incision into the abdomen. One anaesthetist claimed that upbeat music was positively correlated with problem-free surgeries, while anything too slow could lead to complications.
• It’s not all technical language that’s used by the team. There can be a lot of “Grab that thingy there and take the guk off it.” 
• People take a long time to wake up from anaesthetic. Consciousness dawns on them slowly, and they don’t remember most of the waking-up process. So the anaesthetists are pretty much free to say anything they want that might help speed things up, and they can be a tad harsh about it!