Funky day at work… I did my first live operating room recording this morning, which means I spent about seven hours standing around in blue pajamas, a mask, and a stretchy shower cap while pointing a video camera at a hole in someone’s head. And the strange part was that it was a lot of fun.
It’s not something I’d want to do every day, but it was a lot easier than I thought it might be. I have to admit that going into the whole thing I was a bit nervous about how queasy I might get, but I suppose I’ve been working with medical imagery for long enough that seeing it up close and in person doesn’t bother me much. As a matter of fact, after things got started, I was so fascinated by what was going on that I didn’t have a chance to get grossed out. Plus I was too busy staying out of everyone’s way while still trying to get good footage.
It was easy for me to tell when I had a good angle on things. I’d start recording and one of the observing medical students would step in front of me, blocking my shot. Fortunately, I was using one of the niftiest devices in our photographic arsenal, the Monopod. Basically, it’s a pole with a camera mount on top and three tiny folding legs in the base for hands-free stability when needed. With that, I was able to lift the whole thing up over everybody’s heads and get some great over-the-shoulder shots of the surgery.
The procedure itself was the mapping and removal of a brain tumor. The tumor mapping was the most time consuming part of the opreration, but it was also the most interesting… Now I’m going to massively oversimplify things here for people who don’t want all the gory details, but basically the trick is to remove all of the cancerous tissue without damaging healthy brain. And the best way to determine if you’re in contact with healthy brain is to talk to the patient while you operate. Obviously, the patient has to be awake for this… Fortunately, there aren’t any sensory nerves inside the brain itself, and the pain from the incision and all can be blocked with a local anesthetic.
The patient sounded a little drunk from the anesthetic, but was otherwise fairly cheerful and chatty. (And yes, I’m going to have to keep identifying the patient as “the patient” no matter how awkward it gets. Confidentiality issues and all, eh?) At one point they asked for a laptop, “Just so I can check my email…”
Can you imagine how strange it would be to get e-mail from someone who was lying on an operating table with the top of their skull open? Freaky.
Still, they kept a great sense of humor about the whole thing. Their family was in the waiting room and we would phone out every so often to keep them up to date with the procedure. During one of these updates the patient gave us a message to pass along.
Q: “What do you call an Amish man with his hand halfway up a horse’s ass?”
A: “A mechanic.”
The doc who’d brought me in to film the whole thing made sure I’d gotten that on tape, and said that the “sense of humor center is obviously intact.”
I should say so. I don’t think that I’d do that well after lying in one posititon for seven hours while people poked around inside my head.