Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So_ A Memoir - Mark Vonnegut [27]
A surgeon in charge of my surgery rotation said that he knew who I was but that he was going to treat me as if I was normal. I sincerely thanked him and told him I would try to act that way.
Like other things we do to protect patients from our germs, hand washing and wearing gloves and masks, scrubs and surgical gowns were adopted originally to protect doctors and nurses from the diseases of the people they were taking care of.
Scrubs were not made to be worn outside of the OR, where they were always covered by sterile gowns, but as soon as the first absentminded surgeon went out of the OR in scrubs, fashion history was made.
Scrubs have no pleats. Except for the patch pocket over the left breast, suitable for holding three-by-five index cards, they are exactly like cutout clothes for paper dolls. When they started using scrubs in the OR they were white, but blood on white looks too much like what it is and bright white under OR lighting was not restful. Now they are slightly rumpled, gray, blue, green, or, more recently, pink. They started using pink in the OR under the mistaken assumption that doctors wouldn’t want to be seen in pink scrubs in the cafeteria or elsewhere. Very shortly after the introduction of “OR only” pink scrubs, pink scrubs were everywhere, including neighborhood basketball courts.
If everyone wore surgical scrubs instead of regular clothing, we could save trillions of dollars. There is no other way to fully clothe a person for less than ten dollars.
Doctors on call or stepping out of the OR are so important they don’t have time to put on a shirt and tie. Exhausted, unshaven, and wearing scrubs, I was more credible than with a freshly shaven face, pressed shirt, and tie. There was an intrinsic seriousness to what we were doing that made wearing scrubs okay.
Back in Hollywood Hospital, there were no scrubs. The doctors were very well dressed, and the patients were in pajamas. The doctor in charge of the whole place wore baby-blue alligator shoes, drove a light blue ’59 Cadillac convertible, and wore what I was sure was the button to end the world as a tie clip.
I wanted to be a good diagnostician. There was a way of touching people that created trust and gave relief from the day-to-day way people treated one another. I was watching and learning from masters. The doctor’s job was to shut up long enough to let the patient be the most important person in the room, because she was. There was an unforced and absolutely real respect for people just because they were people. And we, as doctors, were their servants. For all the things that felt wrong, that felt right.
If you weren’t an idealist, why would you go to medical school?
During my core rotation most of our patients were eighty-five or older with overwhelming, intractable problems, which we ignored while looking for things around the edges to adjust. If there was something that we believed in, that helped us keep our spirits up, it was the salvageable patient.
When one of my fellow students presented a demented ninety-six-year-old patient who went into heart failure because she ate tuna fish, I couldn’t help wondering aloud what exactly the point was. Our junior resident told us that the point was for us to learn physiology from fragile patients so we would be ready and up to the task of saving a salvageable patient when one came along.
Richard was a very polite, fastidious twenty-nine-year-old heroin addict who was nervous about letting anyone except himself draw blood because they might mess up the few good veins he had left. I watched his technique closely. Learning how to draw blood and do other procedures was high on my