The Hands Of A Surgeon

The past year, I’ve been lucky enough to shadow a pediatric surgeon to understand what it is like to operate. The aspect which has stood out to me the most is the ability a surgeon’s hands have to heal.

I’ve watched medical documentaries and seen a fair share of dramatised surgical scenes on television, but they didn’t prepared me for the operating room. The removal of a 17cm cyst which I observed this February was a procedure that required an organised table of metal surgical tools, multiple surgeons, and time. However, as I watched, I realised something – it wasn’t the instruments that made the procedure possible, it was the surgeon’s hands. My expectation was that surgery was going to be mechanical, precise, clean, and reliant on surgical equipment.

The most defining moment wasn’t the scalpel incision, the tissue forceps holding back layers of skin, or the electrical cautery (although I admit, watching this in action was fascinating), but rather the moment the surgeon used his own hands to take (scoop) out part of the extensive cyst from the patient. He handled the thin, and delicate cyst wall in a gentle way no tool could without breaking it. Actually, this made me realise that the human body is not a textbook diagram. Surgeons have to work with patients, not only on them. A reason this career is fascinating to me, is how little I know and understand about it right now. The amount of knowledge, time and experience I would have to devote to learning about the human body is exciting to me.

Television shows tend to portray the operating room as chaotic, fast paced, and dramatic. Although I was not observing emergency surgery, or life threatening cases, the reality I saw was calm, methodical, and surprisingly quiet. I saw a lot of focused teamwork. The first time I observed a surgery, I closed my eyes behind my glasses and stood far away. I walked in thinking I’d feel uncomfortable. A few months later, I walked out yesterday, having seen multiple procedures over the last few months, and hoping to see more in the future, and realised that these experiences are the most valuable and thought provoking I’ve had in my life so far.