The One Man Band Concept Comes to the OR

I simply love one man bands. The notion of one person or one object having more than one function is fascinating and has led to things like Swiss Army Knives and the Shop Smith woodworking tool that is a drill press, lathe, router, bench saw and who knows what else all in one. Unfortunately, the operating room is an area of specialization. Each instrument and person has one specialized purpose. It's time for a new paradigm in surgery where doctors, nurses, and instruments take on more than one function. Here are a few possibilities.

Too much perfectly good product (I learned that term from those smart alecky business types that run hospitals today) gets tossed. It seems like we had to set up suction on just about every case and then throw it out regardless of condition. On some minor cases the suction container was empty at the end of the case. It just so happened that these minor cases had the most frequent episodes of nausea upon emergence from the anesthetic. It's tough to work up much of an emesis after being NPO, but I have seen it happen. I think that raw gastric content without food to act as a buffering agent can be even nastier than the usual garden variety of emesis mixed with an assortment of foodstuffs.

Now grab that  empty suction container and proudly present it to your upchucking patient. This trick worked like a charm until the end of my career when some genius designed a closed system suction bottle. Bring back the old school coatainer that you can zip the top off and you have a dual use product. Not exactly the equivalent of a one man band, but at least we are back on the right track.

A nobel prize awaits the inventor of a truly functional combination needle holder/scissors. This device would have marvelous utility and could free up a harried scrub nurse for important things like counting sponges and cleaning bloody instruments rather than assisting with the actual surgery. I can't tell you the number of times I have been happily buffing up  a Babcock  with a 4X4 so it shines like the bumper on a '57 Cadillac, only to be rudely interrupted by the surgeon bellowing: "Fool get down here, I need you to cut suture for me." There are now combination needle drivers (as you whippersnapperns are so fond of calling them) that are capable of cutting suture. The present  design greatly limits their usefulness. The scissors part of the instrument lies inside the needle driver making it necessary for the surgeon to work with essentially 2 instruments of different lengths. Muscle memory is a powerful mistress and if you want  to drive a surgeon totally nuts, supply him with instruments of differing lengths. There is never a happy ending with this type of muscle memory confusing instrument and the end result is an outburst of swearing. Hey, maybe we could repurpose that suction container as a cuss bank.

What we need here is a needle holder with the gripping jaws exactly the same length as the scissors part. I am thinking of something with a dual head design akin to a bicephalic creature with both the scissors cutting element the same length as the needle holder jaws.

An old school hybrid anesthetist / circulating nurse was sometimes called into duty on late day or  emergency call cases when there was a shortage of personnel. I am certain this would not be tolerated in today's regulated health care world with all the electronic monitoring devices behind that ether screen, but with a BP cuff and precordial stethoscope these were much simpler times. Once a case was under way the anesthetist would call the circulator over and ask for coverage while he attended to an induction in another room. Once surgery was underway he would scamper back to the original room. This did not happen often and once a sleepy resident was aroused to cover it was back to business as usual.

I was scrubbed once with a novice circulator who seemed anxious about her newly found role as an anesthetist. The attending anesthesia doc ran out of the room for an emergency, but offered succinct instructions for the newbie anesthetist: "Every time you take a breath squeeze that big black bag."

I know nothing of laproscopic surgery, but this discipline seems fond of multifunction devices. I recall a few years back, Olympus announced the Thunderbeat a  combination ultrasonic tissue cutting tool and bipolar cautery. Maybe something was lost in the English translation, but I would be plenty nervous if someone wanted to insert a device named Thunderbeat near my spleen or pancreas.

It does seem like a good idea and in retrospect, I wonder why someone never came up with a dual purpose Metzenbaum dissecting scissor and bipolar cautery. It could be named the "Smokeysnips." If someone could figure out how to add a smoke evacuator to this instrument it could serve several needs; a cutting device, a cauterizing device, and a smoke evacuator.

Here is another 3 in 1 device. We used our trusty Mayo scissors to snap the metal band off multidose vials so the contents could be poured into color coded medicine cups on the scrub nurse's Mayo stand. Unfortunately this really dulled a good pair of sharps so a dedicated multidose vial remover would have great utility.

Since our ORs were on the 7th floor, the windows lacked screens. Occasionally a Chuck Yeager of the insect world would make his entrance to the OR. We did have flyswatters, but you could never find one when you needed one. Combine a multidose vial opener and a flyswatter with perhaps an Oxygen tank wrench and Presto, a multi function instrument of unprecedented value.

I'm saving the best for last. After a long case the first thing I loved to do was tear off my mask without untying it. That ripping noise of the attachment strings separating from the mask was down right satisfying. Next on the agenda was a quick eyeglass clean up. Blood, prep solution, bone chip residue and unidentified material had an affinity for eyeglasses. If an enterprising mask supplier could add a strip of microfiber to the part of the mask, it could be used to clean eyeglasses post ripping off shenanigans. I really could have used something like that.