My job as a Surgical Sterilizer includes setting up instrument trays for various surgeries, then scrubbing them up and cooking them afterwards. There’s a lot of inventory-taking, towel-drying, and blood, and the hours are quite long – from 8:30am until about 2 hours after the last surgery has finished, which can be quite late. The best part is that I’m right in the middle of the action – within the first three hours of work, the nurses invited me in to see a cleft lip/cleft palate surgery (!!), and I was captivated. I hadn’t realized just how much of an art surgery is – it seems so imprecise; there are no lines to cut along, and every body is so different in its proportions. I guess that’s why you have to be in like 37th grade before you can be a surgeon.
The patient was a woman in her 30’s who had lived her entire life with no upper lip – essentially her mouth and nose were one big cavity, making her an outcast. It only took a few hours for Dr. Parker to give her a new face, and it would probably change her life dramatically. I went into the recovery room afterwards to see the results, and she was just waking up. She was wide-eyed and terrified, but Dr. Parker had done an amazing job, and we told her she looked beautiful.
(Have I mentioned that I tear up at least 13 times a day here? I think I’m turning into a wuss…)
In other news, anyone who has ever seen me in the morning or in the humidity, and especially anyone who has seen me trying to mix one of those things with athletics, will be shocked to hear that I voluntarily woke up at 6am and went running in a humidity index of about 99% and strong stench of fishy diesel. Why the sudden freakish behavior? Well I hadn't actually been off the ship in over 48 hours, and I think that makes you do funny things...
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