Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Focus
I love these staged operating room photos. You’ll find one in the brochure of every general surgery residency across the country. Know what’s funny about it? The only time general surgeons turn the lights out is for laparoscopic surgery. Yup, this photo is 2% truth, 98% dramatic effect.
Senseless digression: While I was a grad student, my thesis advisor co-founded a software company whose product analyzed DNA sequences. The company wanted to run ads in Nature and Science and all the rest of the journals, so they commissioned an advertisement company to do a photo shoot in our lab. Why shlep electrophoresis rigs and micropipettes to a studio when the studio can come to us?
My advisor wanted one of our post-docs to “star” in the ad. The ad man looked us over and deemed us all too unscientific. He brought in a model — a dumpy, balding, pasty-faced man who looked like he had been raised in a potato cellar. We all got a good laugh out of that.
Back to surgery . . . and to that photo in particular. I suspect folks like these shots because they capture the intense focus of the operative experience. That bright light? That’s your attention. Everything else drops away into the shadows. It’s what many of us love about operating.
And then there are those of us who stress out over each and every case. Of course, the two states — anxiety and keen focus — can and do coexist. You try to table the anxiety and let the case itself dominate your mind.
One of the reasons you hear stories about a surgeon throwing instruments, screaming abuse, or otherwise acting like a four-year-old deprived of his Power Rangers fix is that something has upset his concentration. The surgeon has to stop and rally his attention once again. It takes effort. It isn’t fun. Operating is fun. Waiting for your scrub, circulator, or anesthetist to fix a problem is not fun. It’s annoying. And if it happens often enough, it affects patient care.
Sometimes I wonder if I don’t scream enough or throw enough instruments. Today, I had a wobbly microscope. When you’re looking at things under magnification, even a slight harmonic motion looks like an earthquake, and this was far from a “slight” harmonic motion. I asked my circulator to fix it, she said she couldn’t do anything until after the case, so I shut up. Afterwards, when I complained about how irritating it was, she said, “You didn’t say anything else about it, so I assumed you were fine with it!”
Grrr. Maybe I should do like my son does. If he doesn’t get a question answered, he repeats it until it does get answered. It’s an effective technique.
For the most part, though, the focus was good today. It was a relief, too; it gave me several hours in which I didn’t need to wonder if I was being a total creep for making my friend in Santa Rosa wait ANOTHER month for my decision, didn’t obsess over the merits of this job opportunity over that one, wasn’t asking myself for the fiftieth time if I’ve done my family and myself a disservice sticking with this community for nearly ten years*.
I had better things to think about.
D.
*One of my friends in the hospital said, “People are wondering how you lasted this long.”
“Yakknow my dad always wanted to be an ENT doc.
But he was too short, so he became a GYN.”
Prrruuuumpt!
Just out of curiousity, on average how many times a day do you hear that joke?
That would be the first, Dwight.
Now . . .
That one, I hear constantly.
he mad the post doc sound like wide reciever. and never fear i love the digressions LOL