Life in the OR

Life in the OR at Bitburg saw routine days, with appendectomies, D&Cs and hernia repairs, as well as the unexpected emergencies. I took the picture you see above on my day off, when our ophthalmologist allowed me to scrub and mask and bring my Pentax Spotmatic camera into the OR. He's performing strabismus surgery to correct a little girl's crossed eyes. It was an elective procedure, and it was an operation I'd never seen before. The delicacy with which he worked was impressive.

The emergency surgeries were often far less delicate. Young GIs and dependent children can get themselves into a lot of serious trouble.

We spent an afternoon sewing up a couple of dependent teenagers who had been exploring an old German bunker from World War II. Inside, they found unexploded shells, and they picked up one of them and tossed it to see what would happen. Their toss wasn't far enough, and they were badly injured when it exploded.

On another occasion, a flight-line mechanic somehow over-inflated a tire for an F-4 Phantom fighter jet. When the tire exploded and the rim blew off, it sliced off much of his left butt cheek. We spent most of a night in the OR stabilizing him so that he could be medevaced to the States the next day.

Americans weren't the only troops we worked on. There was a small French casserne less than a mile away, and British forces were also in our vicinity. During a British forces exercise one fine spring evening, a helicopter with a half-dozen troops on board hit a power line and crashed. Two of the survivors came to us, one with a subdural hematoma. We had no neurosurgeon on staff, so the emergency fell to one of our general surgeons. It was the first and only time I ever scrubbed for cranial surgery.

I suppose what gave me the most to think about was when we were prepping the patient. "Shave his head, and save his hair in a paper bag," the OR's chief nurse told me. "Why are we saving the hair?" I asked. "Because if he dies, the undertaker will need it," she said.

The surgeon, after consulting with a neurosurgeon at Wiesbaden Air Base (a large American base about 90 miles away), used a hand-drill to make a hole in the patient's head to relieve the pressure. Blood poured out. The surgeon put the plug back in his skull and the patient survived -- at least long enough to be airlifted back to home. I don't know what the ultimate outcome was.

One of the oddest -- and somehow saddest -- cases I ever scrubbed on involved three airmen who had been part of a detail using a front-loader to clean brush from the base perimeter near the flight line. At the end of the day, three of them decided to ride back to the storage shed in the front-loader's bucket, their legs dangling over the cutting edge. The front-loader hit a rut, tipped forward, and crushed their legs. One suffered major bruising. Another broke both of his legs. The third came into the OR with one leg dangling by its tendons below the knee. The other leg was badly crushed. We amputated the first leg and spent hours trying to stabilize and pin the other leg. He was only 19 years old.

I learned something important about myself from these unusual cases: I was in no danger of freaking out in the OR. We were focused completely on doing the job we had to do. There was no time for introspection or philosophical thoughts. It was all about saving lives.

My fellow medics and I could get into some crazy stuff in our off-duty lives. But in the OR, it was all business. I never worked for a surgeon who lost his temper or threw instruments. I saw OR medics who did more than I ever imagined they could do -- and perhaps more than they ever imagined they could do.

Mostly, what I did was suck up new knowledge and experiences like a sponge. I gave some serious thought to using the GI Bill to go to medical school after my tour of duty was up. If it hadn't been for my commitment to journalism, I might have done just that. It was a close call.