Friday Morning in Theatre- Edited

I want to be a surgeon. Therefore I value all the opportunities I get at Medical School to watch surgery. I've attended theatre quite a few times, but yesterday's experience was like no other. I met the fiercest nurse ever in my life. And she was not fierce in the good sense of the word.

Like most days, when a medical student arrives at theatre, the consultant surgeon is nowhere to be found. They are usually late, so I'm always hanging around feeling a bit lost and trying to find the relevant people and the right place. This happened again (the theatre I was meant to go to was closed that day...) but it was no big deal as I was used to it. So I introduced myself to the theatre sister (the nurse in charge), and wondered who and where the consultant surgeon was. She was a short oriental lady. And she was very loud. Straight up, she told me she didn't want a medical student watching the surgery because the patient had an infection and the operating theatre was small. I stuck around anyway, because I wanted to meet the consultant and see what he says.

After around 30 mins of waiting and trying to figure out where I was supposed to be, the consultant arrived. He told me it was fine for me to watch. Then he went off again to get changed. When I was left by myself, the theatre sister told me go away again. I didn't want to antagonise her by saying the consultant said it was fine, so I said I just need to wait for him to come back to sign my attendance sheet. Then she said she can sign it, and then said that after she's signed it I can't just run off with my boyfriend for the day. She told me to go to the library and study vascular surgery. This was unnecessary. I didn't mention I had a boyfriend. I didn't even want to leave in the first place! And it's called surgery. In order to learn surgery, you actually need to SEE the procedure! It's not just something you can learn from books. I was very unhappy about the way she was speaking to me but I let it go.

So the morning wasn't off to a great start. But then something pretty amazing happened.
I scrubbed in and actually participated in the surgery! This surgery was an arterial bypass surgery. In basic terms, the patient had very bad circulation to his legs. Due to this, he had very bad ulcers in his legs, and he's lost a toe due to ischaemia. If this problem wasn't solved, he would lose his leg in the future. So the goal of the surgery was to take a long vein from his arm, and graft it into his leg- i.e. bypass. After being scrubbed in (this is when you wash your hands, put on sterile gowns and gloves), I saw the surgery very close up. I got to pass surgical instruments, use forceps to pull up the skin, I felt and held the vein that was taken out of the patient. It was INCREDIBLE.

Unfortunately, the theatre sister came back and had a massive shouting rant. She said it was ridiculous that I was allowed to watch in the first place, and now I'm scrubbed in. Nonsense, she thought. She kept staring at me, literally giving me the dirtiest look I've ever received in my entire life. She kept calling me 'the medical student'. If I did something wrong, she would talk to the registrar surgeon and say 'the medical student is...'. She was nasty and made me feel like the size of a grain of rice. I felt so awful that tears started streaming down my face and into my surgical mask. *sigh*

It was such a shame that one of the best surgical experience was dampened by this nurse. I spoke to my friends about it and learnt that she was quite a reputation for being like that. Anyway, this is my final rant of the event. It shall now stay in the past, and I will just remember the good bits of assisting in theatre!