Surgical Technologist, Innova Fair Oaks Hospital

>> Mostly anticipating what a surgeon would need at any given time and sometimes 10 steps ahead so that the surgery goes on with ease. Job entails helping -- assisting surgeons with surgery, passing instruments, preparing graphs. Surgical techs are really important because they see other things that surgeons do not see. They may know things that the surgeon may not think at the moment, not are very important and they react with an easy, you know, set of eyes. Stan, for a long, he -- Stan, three or four for a surgery, he'd get maybe a couple lunch break, [inaudible] back in surgery for the long cases. I specialized in spine, which is a very long -- it's a long, long day. You have to have comfy shoes, you got to well-breathing socks. You have to be comfortable [inaudible] it's too cold in the OR, you have to wear something warmer or wear lead. You might get too hot. You see everything. You see bloody stuff, to stuff that's infected, it smells gross. It can be [inaudible] stressful at times, especially when problems arise. We have cases where they were really bad dual tears in the spine. The patient was -- had previous surgeries, they dissect down and trying to take the [inaudible] off the spinal cord. It tore the Dura completely off; a big chunk so then you have CSF fluid and the surgeon just stops. She has no idea what to do 'cause he's thinking, you know, anesthesia is going to freak out in a second because it's going to -- CSF fluid is going to leak so he [inaudible] for him at the time so then you have think about what the surgeon wants. After a while, you want to go to surgeon specialty and stay there, that's fine, it's great. You can do plastics [inaudible] surgery, whatever, but you should be able to know everything because when you're on call, you may get a hip fracture and you have to know all the stuff. And the [inaudible] come in so they have instruments you may have no idea what to use. As a surgeon tech, you should know everything with a patient because then you're aware of what might happen. If something happens, you know what to do or what not to give them. So the patient is allergic to lidocaine or Marcaine or they can't have certain drugs or [inaudible] or certain hemostatic agents so then you know, okay, even the surgeon may ask for it, you know not to give it to them because the patient will be allergic to that. We see a lot of older people, 40s to 60s, who just come in for disk herniation or spinal fusion from -- they may have done a lot stuff [inaudible] younger age. You can see that and it does affect you down the road, it does. It does kind of make you feel like you're not doing your job properly because your surgeon saved your life, make their lives better and sometimes I go to restaurants, I sit in restaurants and people talk about oh, how their surgery great. I think to myself, oh man, I was probably part of that surgery or, you know, and you know, they had no idea what happened but we did the surgery and it went great and now they're walking around again.