Wednesday, March 12, 2008 Yap: Scrub By Januar E. Yap Meanwhile
THIS much we can gather on the video: A bunch of cheerful masked men in surgical scrubs, they huddled around the patient whose legs hung fast on the stirrups. There wasn’t the usual tension that attends every operating room crisis. No, there was none of that. It was, it seemed, even a cheerful procedure they were doing and you’d think everybody was in for a big surprise. The others in the peripheries took shots of every bit of unraveling that took place with their mobile phones.
At some point, the video panned towards the mounted x-ray film and back to the draped subject. It likewise took shots of the others and a voice supplied the word, saying it was part of documentation.
In a while, the cheering intensified and the camera was fixed on the draped anatomy. A skillful maneuver managed to pull the poor thing out, and a voice called out, “Bravo!” Thus ensued merrymaking and shouting and laughing and the video surveyed, in a sweeping scan, all the cheerful masked faces around. Big success?
Yes. Except that it wasn’t an OB story. It was an embarrassing case of a cologne canister that, for some absurd reason, ended up in the patient’s anus.
The video file reportedly was on YouTube for a while last year until its managers pulled it out for some reasons.
Not too long ago, the national cauldron spilt with seething acid with the controversial nursing licensure examination leakage. If you’d conjure up a caricature out of the faces of medical professionals in this country, you’d draw a bull, with flaring nostrils, in scrub suit and set for ramming at the slightest agitation. In another occasion, the same fury billowed when a US TV series passed a jeer on our doctors.
Well, this time, it’s another story. It’s a bad joke this isolated bunch of irreverent goblins is hurling into the whole image of our medical professionals. And it’s happening right in our own backyard, and the hoodlums in scrubs spoke in our own language.
In your most vulnerable hour in a hospital, you deserve no less but respect, that you’re above all a human being, not a lab rat.
It is rather elementary that every nurse is a patient’s advocate. But that wasn’t the case in the video. The nurses served in the amusement. The doctor brandished the cologne canister and sprayed it right on everyone, knowing fully well his territory was technically supposedly sterile. Everyone simply feasted on the already embarrassing misfortune of the patient. It was a case where not a single kid cried out that that emperor was naked.
There is no escaping from accountability. Every OR procedure is properly documented, even right down to the lowly gauze. There is no way all those masked goblins can not be identified. The operating room where all the mockery transpired is identifiable. This doctors and nurses should be stripped of their licenses.
God forbid, but it will be a matter of time until this video splinters in the Internet, and everyone will find the hopeless preoccupation of swatting flies in the air. Sources said the hospital will soon hold a press conference to explain the matter. Let’s wait.
