Path to SFA Chapter Four

photo credit
prelude here
one here
two here
three
My job as unit clerk was right up my alley. They had always been without one and there was a lot of organizing to be done. With my OCD tendencies, I became the organizer. I created new charge sheets. I organized bookshelves. I rearranged the desk. I retyped surgeon preference cards. I tracked scheduling. I became the keeper of the grease board. Oh yes, and I entered surgery charges.
The keeper of the board was serious business for me. "The Board" is usually a dry erase, magnetized white board. You can write directly on it, but most often there are magnetized strips about two and one half inches tall by two feet or so long, that you write the case information on and then stick the strips on the board. Case info might include the time, patients initials, the surgeon, the procedure, and if there is any room left over, special equipment requested for the procedure. Then the strips are arranged in descending order beneath the operating room number in which the procedure will take place. Since this was a small rural hospital with a minimum of services and surgeons, our strips were color coordinated to the service. Yellow for ortho, green for general, red for the g-y-n. The board was my baby. Without saying anything, everybody knew that they were not to write on my board! If someone attempted to write an add-on strip and I spotted it, I would erase it and rewrite it. If someone had some information they wanted to write on the board for everyone to read, they handed me the info and let me transcribe it. I couldn't have mismatched handwriting on my work of art.
While I didn't really have time to observe surgeries, I would have an occasion or two to peer through the door for a brief glimpse. Thing is, you can't see a lot through a window, just blue gowned bodies hovering over a blue draped patient. If the case happened to be laparoscopic or arthroscopic, you could see what was taking place on the video monitors. As a first time spectator, what was mundane for others was way too cool for me, even though I wasn't sure what I was looking at. I knew that at least for me, surgery was never going to be a spectator sport. I kept dreaming of the day that I would become a participant.
As time went on I began to feel as if I fit right in with the crew. I was invited to the OR meetings. Okay, it was to take notes of the meeting, but it was still an invitation and I felt like an insider, no longer an outsider begging for entry. And then, on one glorious day, the pale warmth of an early winter morning illuminating the room, the announcement came.
One of the surgical techs was reluctantly relocating due to a change of venue at her husbands' job. I held my breath. The OR manager assured the remaining techs that she would search for a certified tech or at least someone with experience to replace her. My heart sank. I exhaled. I literally wanted to cry. The consensus was that they really did not want to go through the process of training another tech. It would take six months before a trainee would be ready to take call and then that would be with back-up. That meant six months of extra call for everybody remaining. An experienced new hire could be taking call in as little as six weeks. The meeting adjourned and in between the hugs and tears for the departing surg tech, I cornered the manager and begged to be trained if her employee search failed to produce any qualified applicants. I hoped that time was on my side.