I don't know why I'm blogging about this, but I keep thinking about it so it must be important. This year, I've tried hard to have a nice, fun demeaner in the OR. I insist everyone call me by my first name. It just makes the whole day go smooth when everyone is chatty and happy. It's easier to do this when it's just residents and nurses in the room, no stern surgery attendings who must have total silence in order to work. However, in doing this, maybe people forget I'm a doctor and get a little disrespectful around me. I think being a female doctor is hard. You are either not assertive enough or you are labeled a bitch. Last year I was repeatedly told in my evaluations from nurses that I was not assertive enough.

So yesterday, I was helping the other resident assigned to a case bring the patient from the ICU to the OR. He was intubated so I ventilated him during the trip. A young nurse was also with us. She was crabby and slow. It makes no difference to her whether or not the case starts on time because she is a shift worker, but the rest of us are under the gun because we don't get to go home until all the cases are done. She was already short with me because I had warned her to watch out for the patient's foot that was hanging off the bed because I didn't want it to get hit or smushed when we wheeled his bed through the doorway. Once in the room, I'm busy trying to get all his monitors situated and then I started pushing drugs through his IV to get him to sleep so the case could start. In the middle of this, the young, crabby nurse hits me in the arm and says, "Hey!" and points to some cords on the floor. One of the surgical residents saw all this and turned to her and said, "THAT, is Dr. (insert my last name)! "Oh." was all the nurse said.

I guess it made me feel good to get back up from a surgery resident. Anesthesia has such a strange symbiotic/adversarial relationship with surgery, so it's nice to be liked.

Another weird nursing event. I was in a big gynocology-oncology case in which a woman had a humongoid tumor in her belly. It looked like she was pregnant with triplets. The tumor contained 22 liters of black, stinky fluid (that's 44 pounds of fluid!) which gushed out really fast when they opened up the tumor. Anyway, with all that fluid loss, the patient starts to drop her blood pressure so we order blood. The nurses start squabbling over who's job it is to check the blood and make sure it's the right blood for the patient. I'm usually one of the people that do that, because if I'm the one giving it, I'm going to check it. One of the nurses said anesthesia doesn't do that. This caused an arguement between the nurses, then somehow the scrub tech got involved and pretty soon they were all screaming at each other at the top of their lungs. I'm just sitting back behind the curtain thinking to myself, "these people are all nucking futs!". By the end of the fight, they were arguing about something totally different than blood. Keep in mind that during the entire fight, there are 3 surgeons hard at work on this patient. It was surreal. I've never seen anything like it.

The lady survived. She doesn't have cancer.