Behind the Mask

“You look different with clothes on.”

This is something you’ll hear at least once if you work in the OR. To the outsider, it conjures up lurid images of torrid affairs in the on call room ala Grey’s Anatomy. In reality, it is not nearly as exciting.

The thing is, until you’ve been working at a hospital for a while everyone kind of looks the same. Think about it: we’re wearing identical clothes, our heads are covered, and masks obscure 85% of our face. If you aren’t introduced to people in the hallway, your only areas of recognition are their height and eye color. Awesome. For me, this is awful. I am bad with names and faces and it takes me forever to learn new people under normal circumstances. Ask me to identify someone by the 4 inches of face peeking out from behind a mask and I’m sunk.

Understanding how difficult this is, when I started working I made it a point to give people a unique identifier which was visible whether I was scrubbed in or not. I chose to wear crazy shoes. My first shoes were road-cone orange with black owls all over them. One surgeon, who was also bad with names, had no idea what my name was the entire 8 months we worked together, but he’d look down, see my blinding orange owls and nod, like “Oh it’s you. Okay, we’re good.”

Of course, this concept also came back to bite me in the ass. Sometimes…say when you’re just-fell-off-the-turnip-cart new and did a particularly horrendous job in a case…you may not want a surgeon to remember who you are. In these cases, the surgeon developed terrible PTSD somehow triggered by recognition of my shoes and directly relating to my prior performance (or lack thereof). You can recognize this phenomenon when a surgeon (whom you just witnessed laughing and joking at the scrub sinks through the window) walks into the room, looks at your feet, and contorts their face into a visage of pain best described as “Oh god, not HER again!” Luckily, this is the exception and not the rule.

Fortunately, my current hospital is much smaller than my last so there are fewer faces to learn. (My last hospital had 17 ORs. My new one has 5.) The environment is also far different. I was shocked the first week when I was eating lunch and a surgeon walked in and plopped down on the couch across from me to socialize. (Granted, this means you can’t vent about surgeons in the break room. Not that anyone would ever do that anyway…) This DID.NOT.HAPPEN at my old hospital. You saw your surgeons in 1 of 3 places: walking to the OR, at the scrub sinks, or in the OR. That’s it.

However large your hospital is, recognizing colleagues in AND out of the OR takes time. Just as you learn everyone’s set up quirks, instrument preferences, and radio stations, faces and names slowly come together. Heck, if we can memorize and identify hundreds of different instruments, how hard can distinguishing a few people be?

Until next time, stay sterile, my friends.