A Surgical Humanities Blog
Blue and just as dark, the operating room is the urban landscape,
Illuminated by fluorescent street lamps that flicker and fizz like the overhead lights.
Nighttime, a procurement running late.
Smoke from the grates along the side of the road dance in the light like the wisps of the Bovie tip’s smoke.
A man and his drum, beat after beat, flex like the heart.
Next to him another man, breath held, with saxophone in hand, clutched tightly at waist height, and silent.
Four teams of surgeons from three hospitals rapidly descended on the body of a middle-aged man lying face up in an unfamiliar hospital’s tight-fitting operating room. By nightfall, the room was ten surgeons and six organs emptier and this man had gifted a handful of patients with new beginnings.
I began my third-year clerkships on an abdominal transplant service. Lacking confidence in a hospital setting and unsure of how to integrate body systems in my patient assessments, the three-week surgical elective pushed me to my limits. There was no way to prepare for what I quickly discovered to be one of the busiest and least forgiving services in medicine. But despite the physical and mental exhaustion, the novelty of an organ transplant excited me every time. I sought out as many opportunities to return to the field as I could, happily completing one cardiothoracic and another abdominal transplant rotation by the time I graduated medical school. The details of my first procurement follow.
Continue reading “The poetry and chaos of organ transplantation”