Surgery Revisited...

So, I had an interesting conversation with my friend yesterday, and I realized that I didn't explain the "drama" of my job, when I explained it last time.

She asked me if it was anything like TV, or as exciting/scary as the surgeries on TV. Well, TV definitely makes this job much more dramatic then it is in real life, for sure. It seems like on the shows almost every person in the department is having a covert affair with someone else and making out in the supply closet.

While this may happen on occasion in real life (just like any other job really), it is definitely not the norm. And, if it did happen, the whole department would find out about it, and yeah...it would be in the rumor mill for a while. That's about as exciting as it gets.

At a smaller hospital like the one I worked at...very rarely if ever did anything like that happen.

One thing I do always find somewhat amusing is when they are doing a surgery on the show and they ask for an instrument. They don't usually call it by it's actual name, they use a general term. I know why they do this, I mean the TV audience isn't going to have a clue if they hear the surgeon say, "army/navy" which is a type of retractor. So, on the show the surgeon just says "retractor" or "clamp" and I smile because if they were to say that in real surgery the tech would just look at them and say "which one?" Sure, there are certain times when you would know which one, but...yeah, the surgeon is much more likely to say "kelly" (clamp). Anyway, I think you get my point. :)

As for the "scary" surgeries, since we were at a smaller hospital, a lot of the extreme trauma patients automatically get sent to the bigger hospitals. There have been a few times when patients were brought to our O.R. to stabilize someone before transport, but the most emergent/scary surgeries were probably OB patients that were bleeding out, or a c-section that is titled a "crash and slash" because that is what happens...yeah, those are scary. Other than that though, I would say certain surgeries are more intense than others.

Now, at a larger facility where they can do some surgeries right in the E.R., I don't know that I have the stamina to be a trauma surgical tech. Some people do, and they love it, but I don't think I could.

Some surgeries are definitely sadder than others...at least for me. It is always sad to help on a surgery of a patient that is going to die. Not from surgery, but from something like cancer, and the surgery is just to help alleviate pain and see how extensive the cancer is.

D&C's are always sad procedures for me, even though they are fairly short, because it almost always involves someone who miscarried and they wanted to be pregnant very badly. It is not uncommon for these patients to cry, and I have to just not think about it or I will cry too.

Most surgeries for me are like a puzzle. You know what you want the outcome to be, and you know what you need to get there, and then you just do it.