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The Surgical Changing Room

From gossip to jokes to memories to gloating–the changing room at the hospital has seen and heard it all

“Hey, Mazda!” an orthopaedic onco-surgeon introduced himself to me while I was getting into my operation theatre scrubs in the surgical changing room. For the uninitiated, the surgical changing room is the sanctum sanctorum of any hospital, where all men (without exception) who are meek and silent at home, disrobe from their submissive domestic attire, and become loud and boisterous, adorning their superhero capes, getting ready to take on the egoistical world of saving lives.

“You probably don’t remember me, but I operated on you around 2 decades ago,” he said to my surprise. The only operation I’ve ever had was to remove a benign (non-cancerous) tumour from a small bone of my left foot, I recollected. “I was part of that team,” he smiled, reminding me of how nervous I was getting an incision on my foot and how I have now transformed to cutting open people daily. I was instantly reminded of the ordeal I had completely wiped out from my memory. The surgical changing room is a great place to catch up on old times.

“What surgery are you doing today?” I asked. “I do only bone tumours now, that’s my specialty,” he flexed a little, having progressed from the conventional world of knee and hip replacement surgery. “We are removing a tumour from someone’s femur and replacing the entire bone with a custom-made 3D implant,” he told me enthusiastically. “What about you? he asked. “I’m doing an acoustic tumour,” I bragged a little. “Going to remove a large tumour from someone’s hearing nerve and try and preserve hearing,” I gestured with fine movements of my hands, not realizing I hadn’t tied the knot on my pyjamas, which came slipping down. The surgical changing room is a great place to gloat. Surgeons often like to bluster about how complex their case is going to be and how many more cases they have than their peers. It’s also a place where they whine about how long anaesthetists take to induce a case, while the anaesthetists are doing the same in a room next door, wondering when a surgeon is likely to finish a case.

Just then, our senior general surgeon walked into the room to change and jovially offered up his list of cases for the day. “I’m busy putting my head in people’s bums all day,” he rued, adjusting his mask to be well above his nose as he spoke to us about piles, fissures, and fistulas. He narrated a story of how he did an emergency surgery the previous evening and removed a dumbbell from someone’s rectum. “They told me it was a gym accident!” he said, raising one eyebrow. “God knows what the kids of today are up to nowadays,” he sighed, as the rest of us conjectured on what actually might have happened. The surgical changing room is a great place for such gossip.

A cardiac surgeon sauntered in at the same time, all of us changing simultaneously in what now seemed like a cramped space between the wall and rusty lockers that line the room. “If one more person comes in, I’m sure our PPs will touch!” I said, using a cruder word, deciding to petition the hospital administration for more space. I was, of course, referring to polypropylene, a material used to make surgical gowns, but the surgical changing room is a great place for lewd jokes. We quickly bid each other the best for the day and charged out to appear important, as other doctors walked in screaming for tops and bottoms unavailable in their size or finding holes in apparel where they aren’t mean to be.

The surgical changing room is also a great place to alleviate frustration. You can redirect your wife’s anger to an implant that hasn’t arrived on time and you can deflect your kids’ tantrums on the staff not shifting the patient soon enough for you to start your case. You can crib about the stock market, the traffic, or the weather, and you’ll find someone to hear you vent, albeit while they scroll on their phone while pretending to listen to you. Our theatre complex has a common changing room for all staff – ward boys, attenders, technicians, and surgeons – so each day, there is a different array of torsos to view, sights to see, smells to savour, and sounds to hear.

The changing room first thing in the morning is very different from the room one sees at the end of the day. In the morning, clothes are stacked neatly and there is a whiff of freshness in the air, while towards the evening, notices of “Please keep your scrubs in the bin” are clearly ignored, with gowns scattered all over the place. As they walk in to change, you’ll see tired surgeons rip their masks off as if they’ve just returned from war, and caps are strewn around like confetti at a Coldplay concert.

The surgical changing room is also a place for hope and prayer. When surgeons return to it after surgery, wiping the metaphorical sweat off our brows, we analyze the operation in our heads and sometimes in our hearts. We hope we’ve done the right thing. We pray our patients recover the way we expect them to. As we get out of scrubs into a more mortal outfit, it’s time to surrender and oftentimes even invoke the divine for timely intervention.

When I was a resident in training, the surgical changing room would be the place where the most junior doctors would see their most senior professors in their chaddis. Stalwarts of surgery – professors you’ve shuddered to ask questions to, and even if you did, they barely answered, or professors whose stern stare could make you pee in your pants – had no choice but to drop their guard and be one among everyone else. And once you saw them like that, in your head, you could poke fun at their flab or look at them fondly. You could place them on a pedestal or graze them to the ground. The surgical changing room is a great leveller. We all go out of it wanting to heal, but in the process, we also all hurt sometimes.

“We all share the same sun,” was doodled on Chris Martin’s piano as he wooed Mumbai last weekend. The surgical corollary to that is, “We all change in the same room!” However, the changing room for the female doctors is separate. And thankfully, and I have no idea what goes on in there.

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