It’s a real challenge to get people to feel comfortable with you and to trust you to make them unconscious and get them through surgery. I’m Dr. Douglas Bacon, an anesthesiologist at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, and this is something I deal with each day. Unfortunately, or fortunately, my last name is Bacon. When you have that last name, you either fight anyone who wants to make a joke about it, or you just embrace the joke and play with it. I have a whole series of hats with pigs on them for the operating room, except for two that have bacon and eggs on them. I’ll tell patients “my name is Bacon like the breakfast food,” and I have a series of jokes. Any pre-op nurse that’s worked with me for any amount of time rolls her eyes when I walk in the room because they’ve heard them all a thousand times, but everybody laughs. What that usually does is it gets people relaxed. If you can laugh and joke a little, it helps everyone communicate better and everyone’s at ease and not as afraid to tell me things. I try to be as honest as I can about the risks of surgery and anesthesia but at the same time be relaxed. I want the patient to know that this is the only thing that’s important to me during these five minutes. Then what we do in the operating room is monitor your vital signs and keep you unconscious so as to allow the surgeon to rearrange your anatomy to affect a cure. If there’s excessive bleeding, most people don’t know this but we order two-thirds of all the blood transfusions at the hospital. We have to have a good feeling for how bad is the bleeding, and is this something we have to worry about or something we don’t have to worry about. There has to be communication with the surgeon and the team, too. They need to know what we’re thinking, and we need to know what they’re thinking. I tell people not to fear anesthesia. The old stories of being paralyzed are really fortunately a myth of Hollywood. Our mortality rate is one in 200,000 patients that are young and healthy. When I started 25 years ago, it was one in 20,000. What keeps me going is the challenge, because you never quite know what’s going to happen. I also get to see results of what I do immediately. If I give a drug to treat blood pressure, I know within about five minutes if it’s worked. I also get the satisfaction of knowing this patient has made it through surgery and has a new hip, or the cancer has been removed. That’s really neat for me that I know I’ve been part of a cure. I’m also a professor and chair of the Department of Anesthesiology, so I have obligations in research and in the administration.I get to teach young people that want to do this or that think they might want to do this how to do it. Just know this about your anesthesiologist: Zero pain is not going to happen, but we want you to be comfortable. We put a real emphasis on patient safety, and we were the first specialty to really advocate patient safety. source
