It’s almost a universal look and agreement in the Travel OR nursing world, nobody likes to work with GYN. The dread that I feel when I see that I am assigned to a GYN room for the day. I wonder if I could pay off the charge nurse to switch assignments, or attempt to look sick to leave early? As a travel nurse no one would really care about your feelings or health, I better just head to my room.
Arriving to GYN rooms, you either get the tech who is absolutely dreading it like you, or the tech who believes that these GYN cases are “the best”, I’m not sure which is worse. Myself, I prefer to gripe with a tech who hates it, because she probably has the skills to be in other rooms, which means she will have the skills to deal with whatever the GYN doctor messes up under a calm demeanor.
First case, Davinci Lysis of endometrial adhesions. Looking at the doctors, immediately fills me with dread. We will just call her Dr. Smith, the loudest, most obnoxious female GYN surgeon I have met in a while. Walks in the room with volume on 100%, trying to be jovial just coming across as rude. I take my mopey but to preop in hopes I can get this case done early and spend my evening recovering with a coffee outside somewhere.
Arrive to the room, and get the patient asleep, intubated, and ready to tuck arms and position. Look around, nobody in sight. Where did that huge pile of residents and students go that were pushing me to go back in preop? Sigh…..put patient in stirrups, pull them all the way down to the bottom of the bed, arms tucked, shew…..in walks Dr Smith, “oh no, we need the patient down further, arms tucked up here, this there”, I just walk away, if you want your patient a certain way, you can position them if you aren’t going to show up and help.
Surgeon is at the field, asks for knife and first trocar. I have hooked up all the things, camera, gas, and sit down to chart. When I look up at the screen, and see bowel! Dr. Smith says “I think we are in the stomach?”, out of frustration I state “No you are looking at Shit”, she says “yeah I think your right, can you call a general surgeon?”. Ugh, this is how this day is going to start. Then I look up and she pulled the trocar out. I think, great, now we will spend hours running bowel to find the hole your made. General surgeon I call is not surprised and you can hear the frustration in his voice, that his entire morning lineup just got messed up from Dr. Smith.
General comes in, and I watch the dynamic unfold of Dr. Smith trying to look smart and offer all the dorsey bowel graspers and things that HE CLEARLY ISN’T ASKING FOR. Like I get you feel dumb for hitting the bowel, but let the general surgeon repair it without so much input that wasn’t asked for. General surgeon spends about two hours finding and fixing the hole and off he went, morning officially ruined.
Now we play the game of DaVinci dock, DaVinci undocked, switch to stryker camera, now Davinci scope. Scrubbing in, scrubbing out. I ponder my life choices and wonder how I ended up in this room? Did I act dumb in another case and this is my consequence? Did I piss off the charge nurse and this is my payback? We are 10 hours into this nightmare of a case, when I look up and see the bladder. I see a quick movement, with a scant amount of fluid. Dr Smith knows what happened, and is trying to downplay it, “I will just oversew the bladder”……. I am already looking up Urology on my phone. CRNA comes in to change shifts and I hear the CRNA say “ummmm the foley bag is full of air”. Dr Smith says “oh my, can you call urology”.
Urology gives me the same response as general did when I tell them “its GYN”. Ughhh, you can hear the dread in their voice from having to come in and fix these nightmare cases. They report they will be there in an hour. I relay the message to Dr. Smith who is still trying to justify what has transpired in this case. At this point my 12 hour shift is over, and I have no idea what we have even done in the actual procedure. My evening nurse comes in to relieve me, and I give report.
Next time I will call in, this is why I hate GYN.