Confessions of an OT junkie

I must use my words carefully. Whether by coincidence or via a mole, my boss has started referring to me as "Dr J" (ie using just this title and not my real name) which means he may be reading these blogs. If you are sir, please leave a reply and say hi, otherwise I shall proceed with caution.

Anyway, the above mentioned consultant told me today that I HAD to see this certain operation he was about to perform today. So I quickly flew through the daily ward stuff and wrote in big red letters on the white board "In operating theatres, only page if urgent!"

So I ran down stairs as fast as I could, donned my magical blue scrubs and powered up for a scrub in with the boss and reg. Turned out we were doing a laprascopic nephrectomy and lithotomy using a new innovation called a "gel-port". Basically we were pulling a huge 15cm stone out of someone's ureter but insetad of using the rather cool standard fibreoptic camera cuts we were using this new technology called a 'gel-port' where a glowing green circle is placed into a cut in the patient's abdomen and you then shove your hand thru the port into the patient's abdomen and watch your hand on the TV screen. It kinda looks like the TV show Stargate where this people have alien-snake creatures in their abdomen called Goa'uld which exited from their hosts via a similar star-shaped port in their tummies. In the end we needed to convert to an open approach which meant the poor guy had the gel-port for nothing... but as an aside, my boss informed me that the port is made form the same rubber as "blow-up dolls" (you know those one's nerdy guys who can't get dates have stored in their cupboards?) That information will come in handy on trivia nights I'm sure!

As I was about to pass out from low blood sugar standing still in the operating theatre for over 4 hours straight, the kind scout nurse appeared with a packet of Allens snakes and offered to insert them between our face and our surgical masks. So there we stood with our hands coveed in blood in this guy's abdomen whilst a nurse hand fed us sugar snakes to keep us going. A bizarre sight indeed!

It was so nice today to be scrubbed up and have my hands inside someone's belly. Not becasue I'm some weird fetish psych patient, but becasue it afforded me the oppurtunity to NOT answer my pager. That blasted beeping contraption gives me nightmares everytime it goes off. It has one of those crescendoing bleeps that means if you catch it early enough it's not too loud, but when you're in theatre and the nurse has to answer it for you, it gets to be quite loud and the boss kinda looks around as if to say "Whose beeper is disturbing my performance here?" SO today I just let the darn thing bleep all it wanted and everytime the scout nurse answered it for me, I would tell her to tell whoever it was on the other end to call the other registrar if it was urgent cos I was scrubbed.

Everytime I hear that thing go off, I feel my heartbeat quicken and my blood pressure slowly rise. Is it the ward calling about some sick person? Is it pharmacy asking about the dose of a medication? Is it the lab calling about a hyperkalaemia?

My reg told me an amussing anecdote about how her pager as an intern sounded like a bomb going off with a progressively frequent beeping noise. Apparently one anaesthetist banned it from their OT because the stress of impending explosions was too much for their sensitive soul. But now I've come to the point where I 'hear' my pager going off whenever I am in crowded places and there's any sort of electronic beeping noise.

I think I need help!