Scrub

My father had a favorite piece of advice – no matter how much education you have, always have a fallback trade. And Nick Carreras always had a wide variety of them. And admonished me to do likewise.

My father had passed on before I went to graduate school. But I frequently heard his voice offering advice. And in fact, I did have fallback skills in health care. I qualified as a surgical technician after years of working in the OR. During summers away from grad school, I earned a living as an aide on Medical/surgical floors at hospitals. Hard skills are always needed. It was soon found that my asceptic technique and ability to assist in minor surgical procedures were handy.

So, when I left grad school and found myself unemployed, I had a fallback plan. I returned to hospital work and eventually to the Operating Room. The OR is a small and close society. So it wasn’t long before everyone knew the particulars of a Tech with most of their doctorate completed, a cat ( the Grey Menace, who loves O-negative blood), and an employment problem.

The OR can be a chatterbox location. You can alternate between periods of intense quiet and concentration and periods when you are talking about almost any subject the surgeon finds interesting.

It was fun when anatomy was the subject. Having spent most of a year in anatomy and osteology classes in grad school, I had a better grip on some topics than the interns. One attending physician particularly liked to toss out questions on, say, cranial anatomy and have the interns flounder. He’d then turn to me and ask for a complete description of the sphenoid bone and have his surgical technician, me, rattle off the anatomical description. He smirked and suggest that they should review the relevant anatomy, while the chief resident rolled his eyes at me.

So, I spent two years in the OR as part of a team of intently focused caregivers. Sometimes, it was a grim environment. Some traumatic procedures still stay with me to this day. But other times, it was almost exhilarating.

One day, it all came to an end. I received a job offer that would start my career as an applied anthropologist. On Monday, I was looking forward to a whole week in the OR. On Friday, I began a psychological transition from the closed society of the OR to the larger community I would be serving for the next eight or so years.

I didn’t look back for almost two years. I was much too busy with a new career and responsibilities to review memories of the OR. But over the years, I better understood how that OR experience shaped and influenced me. Like my anthropology, it was not just a job but a calling.

I’ll never return to an OR except as a patient. But the last couple of times I’ve been wheeled into the OR for a procedure, there has been a lot of shop talk – which ORs have you worked in, changes in suture material, all sorts of nifty stuff.

I guess most patients don’t get it…it’s a sort of OR type thing.