BluE Scrubs

Isn’t it just, was all I could say to Michelle.

She was my ODA (operating department assistant) for the trauma list this afternoon. The mercury on the boredom-meter was fluctuating between very bored and bored stiff.

I heard Sharon the scrub nurse spewing remarks like ‘Hello trouble, what have you done this time’. To which I just pulled a long face. Still pestered by the nasty questions from the exam and of course the thought of doing this list and the thought of finishing at 6pm.

No anaesthetist in the right mind likes trauma list. It is completely contrary to the name given. It’s tame , it's not interesting, it’s a-traumatic, it’s full of auditorily challenged cacexic old beadies with fractured hips. I was beginning to anticipate some clever Bluetooth type voice box amplifier especially made for trauma anaesthetists appearing in near future just for communication purposes. I must have upset Koala so bad to be rota-ed for trauma list ya?

The surgeon was Indian, speaks very little, interact very little, smile not at all.

His surgical posies were also ‘bisu’.

Sharon the scrub nurse was preoccupied with her coming holidays so she was in her own little world. At times she looked like she’s watching the rainbow or possibly counting the stars.

The OR audio system is broken and nobody's been motivated enough to fix it.

If you listened hard you could hear the wall humming.

Michelle sat next to me, very close our forearms touched. It was nippy in OR 3. We started talking about skin colours as you would normally, when it’s unbearably boring, and the clock seemed to do pit stops whenever nobody’s looking.

Suddenly a body scrubbed in green thumped to the floor from around the OR table. It’s one of the surgical SHOs (senior house officers) who found the floor more exciting than the patient’s broken calcaneum (read: heel) being drilled. So that got us all out of the choo-choo train to land of bore-bore land for a while. I was secretly hoping for more bodies to thump for entertainment value but those suckers were too strong especially that one with the drill.

The OR was dead again apart from the sound akin to that at the dentist. Send me shivers those little drills..

Michelle sat next to me again. Let’s try again shall we, she said.

“ Blablablablablabla I wish I’ve got your skin. It’s a nice colour. Hate mine. Can’t wait for the summer. Blablablabla ”, she didn’t look like she was going to stop to breath.

She smoothed my forearm and I was feeling queer. Felt strange being touched by a woman like that.

I said to her that it’s amazing how we all want what we don’t have and never really appreciate what we already have. She has lots of pretty freckles. In some situations what we want might even be the very thing some people would give up their collections of Starwars merchandize for and yet we fail to see it.

If the hair is straight, some perm it, to make it wild and sassy. If the hair is wavy and frizzy, some straighten it. Do ‘teknik rebonding’and whatnots.

I am guilty of this wanting- to- be-different at 14 when I wanted to be a boy so badly I wore my hair short. I shall not dwell on some stalkers I had then. These days it’s not as frequent a thought as before. Nobody seems happy with what they have and we always see the grass greener on the other side of the pasture.

On that note Michelle told me about what happened in OR 3 last week. Mr Shresta was scrubbed in his gown and mask and approached the OR table.

On it, fully anaesthetised with endotracheal tube in place, breathing happily on the machine with the gasses saturating her brain, a 30 something year old lady laid in her gown. Looking peaceful but of course slightly tortured with tubes and plumbings coming out from all orifices.

Through all that you can see the stark contrast to us pale boring people in bluescrubs. Her skin was flawless, smooth and dewy. Her hair was shiny, full of body. Michelle spent 5 minutes just talking about the lady’s hair.

Skin on her ample perky chest, peachy and on the sides, evidence of previous tampering with nature. She had them done. All in all she could have been one of those ladies in the NEXT catalogues. Even her nails were nicely manicured.

Mr Shresta was ready and asked for some iodine to paint the skin. Michelle whisked up the lady’s gown exposing the navel and the knickerless groin area.

Mr Shresta turned with a pot of iodine in one hand and a swab-on-stick on the other looking at the groin festooned with an atrophied prominence.

“Holy shit!!! What ‘s that doing here!!!”, possibly echoed right through to the corridor.

I can imagine a prolonged pure comedy one could potentially have if that scene was shot and the film strip repeated to last for half an hour.

It was only a small ‘one’ mind you and I am pretty sure ‘she’ was planning to do ‘them’ all but I suppose, she’s prematurely exposed under construction. Unlucky.