Operating theatre

Being assigned to shadow a surgeon when they operate is very exciting, in much the same manner as falling off your bike is exciting.  There's a brief moment when you think you're flying, then you smash face-first into the ground and get gravel in your hands.

In my experience, surgeons will ask a few anatomy questions in order to demonstrate how stupid you are and then you get to talk to the anaesthetist for the rest of the time.  This morning though, the surgeon was a chatty guy who proceeded to talk to me the whole time.  Sure he was mostly asking me question in order to make me look stupid but as it turns out I had pretty good answers to some of them.

He asked  me:

• Where is the dorsalis pedis pulse?
• Where is the posterior tibial pulse? ("posterior to the tibia" is not the answer he wanted)
• Why do we operate on varicose veins?
• What is a varicose vein?
• What is an ulcer?
• What is inflammation?
• What is a cat? (Yes, he asked me to define a cat.  He was making a point about how difficult it is to define common things that you know well.)
• What is a car?
• What's the capital of Slovakia?
• What's the capital of the Czech Republic?
• What's the capital of Rumania, Bulgaria, Scotland, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, New Zealand, Canada?

I did pretty well with my capitals - he called me a "Man Of The World".  That gave me enough confidence to dispute his claim that New York City is not in the state of New York, which led to him not wanting to play the capitals game any more.  I also did pretty well with my medical definitions, which he fiendishly countered by telling me that my answers were very clever but he thought they were probably clever by accident rather than by design, which strikes me as being unfair.  I didn't do very well with my definition of a cat but that actually made him happy since it suited his rhetorical purpose.

I didn't know that the main reason to operate on varicose veins was as prophylaxis for venous ulcers (which is why we got into the whole ulcer discussion).  I told him that the main reason was cosmetic, which led to him spending the rest of the morning asking if I thought the elderly fellow on the operating table was going to win any beauty pageants, so I said that the elderly fellow should take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.

Exit stage left.