WHAT...Trauma Surgery Cancelled? It's Time for a Fable

 Every long time nurse is acutely aware that nursing can be a leading cause of "fun" deficit. After so many hours standing behind or in front of your Mayo Stand nothing seems to bring about that good feeling that unabated fun provides. (Maybe it's just my foolishness, but I never could deduce if I was in front of my Mayo Stand or hiding behind it.) It's sorta like that chicken and egg quandary about what came first, but when the surgeon is bellowing, I think it's best to be rearward of your Mayo Stand. Boundaries can be a real asset.

It happened more often than you would think, the on call gods were restless and that blasted phone arouses the lowly scrub nurse from a peaceful midwinter slumber. The frantic voice on the other end of the blower announces, "Hey fool...up and at 'em, there is a hot trauma in the ER headed your way, it's time to hit it!"

I scrambled into our trauma room and hastily set up my Mayo and had my back table loaded for bear with enough pieces of sharpened stainless steel for the grandest surgical event known to mankind, Lansing, Michigan! I meticulously scrubbed up at my lucky porcelain scrub sink and my heart was in overdrive, just like a thoroughbred in the starting gate roaring to go.

Most often, this was the beginning of a long, late night slog involving a gazillion needle holders loaded with aching fingers to patch up shredded hollow viscus organs or lacerated livers. My personal, least favorite patch up job was with damaged kidneys, not only were they tough to access in their retroperitoneal hiding spot but required a significant quantity of little fat balls harvested by the hapless scrub nurse to seal and close severed poles. I once asked Dr. Shambaugh to suture a fist sized fat ball to the exposed glomeruli and be done with it and was promptly rebuked, "It doesn't work that way fool!"

Occasionally, an anesthesia resident would poke his head in the swinging OR door and proclaim with overtones of gloom and doom, "The surgery is cancelled, pack up and go back to sleep, Fool, and don't forget the bottom bunk is mine." Cancellations were a big letdown for me and in the back of my head, I knew someone had just crossed over to the other side without even getting a second chance in the OR. Trauma surgery cancellectomies had all the ingredients for a sad...sad story.

So instead of dwelling on death and depression, I would invent alternative realities to the grim happenings. One of my favorite self-told fables was that the poor soul got lucky and managed to sleep it off. What the heck, it was 4:30 AM and everyone else was sound asleep. Everyone is well aware of the regenerative power of a good snooze, well maybe not for massive blunt trauma or big time gunshot wounds, but the notion of  a trauma victim sleeping it off was as comforting as petting a lap dog.

Surgeons and scrub nurses are procedure oriented and live to do things to folks. The sad truth is that most surgical SNAFUS are errors of commission which contrast qualitatively with errors of our non surgical cohorts errors of omission. Maybe this cancellation saved some poor soul from a surgical mishap or foreign body misadventure. HOORAY...that cancellation was a good thing and saved someone from misery and suffering. 

The other mental slight of hand with cancelled emergency surgeries was the notion of a transfer. The fantasy went like this: although we were the only trauma center on the North side of Chicago, the patient was simply moved to another unit or hospital. A much more soothing slight of mindfulness than envisioning a poor soul resting on a hard slab in the morgue cooler.

Although we are living in the twenty-first century, our emotional responses emanate from a stone age brain. Telling yourself uplifting fables isn't all bad, especially if they allay that sense of paralysis inflicted by a troubled limbic nervous system.