e 3 a s h i g R E F L E C T I O N S

Surgeons eat their own!

I am in love with this piece. I can immediately identify with it.

“Surgeons eat their own. It’s part of their culture to treat each other disrespectfully during training. Whether this is necessary to train a surgeon cannot be known.”

In med school, I did a surgical rotation as part of my training. The consultant I worked with had a reputation for being tough on his trainee. Back then, I always had a hard time putting on surgical gloves. It was impossible to manipulate the thing without desterilising it so that it ends up tight on your hands and over the end the surgical gown sleeves. My big sweaty Sandra Bollocks hands do not really help the process. He was getting irritated with me because he had to wait for an extra 30 seconds in theatre while a nurse showed me the easiest way of putting the gloves on and in a sarcastic tone he asked: “What is it that you want to do again when you grow up?”. “I am not sure”, I said, “..its too early to decide.” Then, half mocking myself I looked at my now-gloved hands and said: “probably not surgery!”

He turned to me with a look of relief in his eyes, his face half covered with a surgical mask and said: “Good. I don’t really see you as a surgeon!”

This attitude is not really limited, I found, to their colleagues. An other surgeon I worked with once walked into a patient cubicle, meeting him for the second time only after a brief encounter for 5 minutes the night before and said: “Oh hello again. You know you had this clot. We scanned your abdomen yesterday, yeah? The ultrasound? It shows you have cancer of the head of the pancreas. We cant really operate on it or do anything about it. Its all palliative care from now on. Nurse, could you get the palliative team to come and see him”. That it, no more, no less. He left the room straight after without even allowing time for the patient to ask questions or absorb the shock of it all. The whole thing took him about 40 seconds.

I am just so glad I am not a surgeon.