As I’ve mentioned before, my experiments involve surgery to insert catheters into blood vessels to measure many different things. So they take place at an animal surgery facility. And lots of premeds volunteer at this facility. For the most part, they tend to be your typical gung-ho, annoying premeds. But once in awhile, there’s one that just doesn’t fit in. I’ll call him surgery-phobic guy. I suspect that he’s also people-phobic based on the way he interacts (or fails to) with me and the rest of the crew. He comes in and proceeds to clean the entire building. He wipes down counters, cleans the prep room, and even wipes down the doors to each room. But he doesn’t ever set foot in the operating room. Every time I see him, I wonder why the hell he is volunteering at an animal SURGERY facility if he’s afraid of surgery.
Although there is a virtual army of undergrad volunteers in the morning, they tend to thin out by the latter half of the day. And this facility is creepy as hell, even during the day because there’s absolutely no one around. It’s dead silence except for the sound of the ventilator and the beeping of the pulse-ox. Couple that with the fact that I’ve seen my fair share of weird shit happening with the animals (such as twitching, outright paw dancing, and jerking) and it makes for one very jumpy, freaked out me as I sit there all alone watching the animal on the table.
This last time, I was so relieved when a volunteer showed up. Then I realized it was surgery-phobic guy. Who of course proceeded to scrub down the place. Well, of course, something bizarre happens and it looks like the animal is seizing. So I tell surgery-phobic guy to come into the OR and watch the animal while I go find my collaborator to check out the situation. I walk away before he can object. But my collaborator was on the phone and I didn’t want to bother him. So I go back to check on the animal and it’s still doing its bizarre thing. Poor surgery-phobic guy had this look like, “What? You mean I still have to stay here?” as I walked back out determined to interrupt my collaborator this time. By the time I came back with my collaborator in tow, surgery-phobic guy was standing fearfully outside of the OR. That’s how OR-phobic he is, apparently. It must have been torture. I guess I should have sent him to retrieve my collaborator instead.
But still, why the hell is he volunteering here?!
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