HURRIED | Molly McCormick
It is a busy morning in the surgical suite. We have sixty patients having surgeries today, some small, some more complex. It is my day to be in charge, which means that in addition to the four rooms I am supervising for anesthesia, I am carrying the code pager and the phone for the PACU. My morning is a constant round of seeing patients in the pre-op area, the operating room and the PACU. I never stop walking and my phone never stops ringing.
“Hello,” I say as I answer the loudly ringing phone on my belt.
“We need you to start an IV in 3B. We’ve tried and can’t get it,” the nurse on the other end of the phone says to me.
“OK,” I sigh and quickly hang up. I am in the middle of starting a case and am behind again in getting to the PACU and the preoperative area. The patient needing the IV is not on my list of patients, but I am often the one to be called.
I circle quickly through the PACU and then gather my IV supplies as I rush to 3B.
“Hello,” I say. “I am here to start your IV.”
The man in the bed is here for a facial reconstruction. He has had a blast injury to his face leaving only one functioning half with which to talk and see and eat. He smiles with the half that can smile.
I set to work.
I like to hang the patient’s arm down when I work, and I get down low to the hand for the IV. I begin to make small talk as I apply the tourniquet and prepare my supplies.
“I want to get this fixed,” the man in the bed says. “My daughter is getting married.”
“Congratulations,” I say. “It sounds like a happy occasion.”
“I want to look good for her,” he says.
I continue working, looking down, prepping the vein and then quickly inserting the IV. I know that this will not be a simple repair for this man and his face. I think of all he has already been through.
“I don’t want to walk her down the aisle looking like a monster,” I hear him say.
I am holding his hand as I apply the final taping.
“If I were walking down the aisle with my dad, I wouldn’t be thinking of how he looked,” I say. “I would be thinking of his love, feeling him there with me and how lucky this day is for both of us.”
I finish my taping and look up to check the flow of the IV fluid. As I look up, I see tears streaming down this man’s face. His wife now crying too as she holds his hand.
I pat his hand lightly.
My phone starts ringing again. I move back into the rush of the day, that face, those tears staying with me.
Molly McCormick is a practicing anesthesiologist who has worked in anesthesiology for the past 33 years.