My First Time

Obstetrics: those were cut-throat times. There were so many reasons to shaft your colleaugues: to get as few calls as possible, to get the least unpleasant calls. To attend as few actual deliveries as possible, thereby avoiding as much poo as possible, as many placentas as possible,and as much cleaning up as possible. To get the easiest clinic, the shortest ward round, the longest lunch break. But most of all, in obstetrics, we shafted each other to get the most caesars.

The caesarean section: the operation that happens by the thousandful every day in every major city in the world. I won't say it's an easy procedure, but on the right patient and under competent instruction, even the clumsiest intern should be able to manage one himself. I don't know why we were so obsessed with doing as many of them as possible. We claimed it was because we were terrified of what would happen in the Bush next year (when we're shipped off to the darker parts of the country to provide the Community with Service), and we were expected to do them by ourselves. But really, I think we just wanted to do them because they're fun, and we each wanted to do the most of them because most doctors are congenitally competitive bastards who just need to win at everything.

Oh, the things we resorted to - sneaking into the consultant's office to manipulate the roster seconds before it officially went to press; slipping into theatre when the designated intern for the day was five minutes late, and then refusing to budge; buying the scrub sisters chocolates, cokes and pies to get them to agree to scrub with us. It was lowdown and ugly. And our energy wasn't focussed only on shafting each other, but also on buttering up the registrars as much as possible, so that they would be willing to take a step back and teach. We had to earn their trust before they would hand over the scalpel - proof that we could tie knots, provide decent fundal pressure, and suture the skin neatly enough for the new mom to be able to wear a bikini again were essential if we wanted to earn the sacred title of 'surgeon'.

But, eventually, after enough knot-tying and fundus-squeezing and enemy-making, we were all given a chance. I still remember my first time like it happened a heartbeat ago. I spent the day assisting a reg who finally decided, after eight hours of hard retracting, that he liked me enough to let me do the last one. I scrubbed up, and took my place on the patient's right, as apposed to the assistant's lowly left, and helped the scrub sister clean and drape. I picked up the knife, and gingerly cut through the skin. After an age, I'd finally dissected down to the sheath. The reg stuck his finger in to show me where to cut and I put my blade down and... 'GAAHHHHHHhhh!' The reg clutched his spurting finger to his chest, a little hat of latex glove hanging off the tip of it. I stood aghast as he yanked his gloves off his hands, and then held them under the tap and scrubbed as hard as possible. But the scrub sister yanked me out of my reverie with a 'Come now girlie, there's still a baby inside there.' She assisted me for the rest of the procedure, showing me how to pull the baby out, where to put my stitches and how to make sure there was no more bleeding.

Luckily, the patient was HIV negative, so I only ruined my reg's finger, and not his life. And, despite my clumsiness, he still let me operate with him many, many times again, and of all the interns who did obstetrics with me, I did the most caesars. (Not that it's a competition, of course.)