The Element of Confusion
Dr. Jekyll was a problem from the start. He was a brilliant surgeon and highly esteemed in his community. The problem was: Dr. Jekyll lacked self-awareness in the OR. To put it delicately, Dr. Jekyll was kind of a dick in surgery. (That’s delicate right?)
Have you ever been around a four-year old whose only volume is ear-splitting, standing-directly-in-front-of-the-amplifier-at-a-Metallic-concert, loud? It’s hard to be mad at the kid because he lacks awareness of the fact that he can be heard five blocks away. He’s not trying to be a nuisance; he just doesn’t understand his behavior is obnoxious.
Thus was the problem with Dr. Jekyll. He had no idea that he was being a jerk. He seemed genuinely puzzled when techs “politely declined” (aka: flat out refused) to scrub his cases. Don’t get me wrong. He wasn’t an instrument thrower or one of those docs that likes to attack you personally. Dr. Jekyll’s special brand of awful involved treating everyone in the room as if they were too slow, too dumb, and purposefully inconveniencing him at every step for the entire case. It was no wonder I developed massive anxiety attacks at even the thought of working with this lovely and charismatic individual.
My employer was determined that I overcome my aversion to working with Dr. Jekyll. So it came one fateful day, I found myself employing every stress-reduction technique I could muster while setting up for one of Jekyll’s cases. Generally, when faced with difficult surgeons, my modus operandi is “head down, yap shut, hand them what they ask for, and finish as fast as possible.” This tactic had not only gotten me through many cases without getting crabbed at by surgeons notorious for being screamy, but had also gotten me on the ever-elusive happy side of these people. Unfortunately, I learned a few weeks prior that Dr. Jekyll was immune to my tried and true method of “surgeon management.”
With his imminent arrival hanging over me, I did the only other thing I knew how to do: throw my hands up and say, “Fuck it. He doesn’t like me anyway. Might as well be my adorkably loveable self.”
During the case, I smiled. I giggled out loud at the random jokes rolling through my mind. I used my normal vocabulary, which includes such magical words and phrases as “skinky” (a hybrid of “skunky” and “stinky”), “whatever totes your goats”, and “strategery.” I sang little made up songs to myself as I assembled and passed instruments. I do this CONSTANTLY. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, picture this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCCPwsuyGzk only in scrubs.
I was fully expecting Dr. Jekyll to blow a gasket. I pictured him turning to me, his face beet-red, yelling, “Why aren’t you taking this seriously? You need to focus!!” What I saw instead was a look of sheer confusion. Apparently, what passes for normal comportment in my world did not compute in AT ALL in Dr. Jekyll’s universe. The look on his face said, “I don’t know what to do with this. Do I yell? Do I laugh? What the hell is happening?”
Somehow, I had completely disarmed him simply by being my bizarre self. It was awesome. I left the case that day feeling more powerful and confident than I had in awhile. And while I don’t exactly look forward to dealing with Dr. Jekyll, I no longer fear it. After that day, I decided to try letting my freak flag wave a little more freely than I had been and you know what I found out? Most people were totally into it. Some people got to know me a little better. Other people decided I was unstable enough to leave me alone. Overall, even if they didn’t understand me, at the very least they found me amusing.
This whole experience taught me that just because surgery is serious business, it doesn’t mean you should dull your personal sparkle at work. Wear your Star Wars socks, listen to accordion music on your iPod, draw doodles of sword-fighting cats on your back table… Whatever makes you, YOU. You may not end up being everybody’s cup of tea, but since you can never please everybody anyway, isn’t better to feel like yourself while you do what you love?
Until next time, stay sterile.
