Paging Dr. Robb

I have become one of those people I swore I would never be. One of those people that buy television series on DVD and then watch an entire season in one or two marathon sessions only to run out and buy the next season a few days later.

I think I might have seen too much Grey’s Anatomy. I think it might be affecting my behavior and I find that some of my actions get strange looks from my co-workers. For starters, whenever I go to the men’s room, I end up washing my hands like I am scrubbing in. I scrub them all the way up to the elbow and then walk out of the men’s room with palms held up, toward me, so as to keep them sterile until I can be gloved. It is only half-way down the hall that I realize I am heading for my office for a dull and unimaginative meeting instead of the O.R. for a quick bit of pre-lunch neurosurgery.

Although I have to say, there are times when I am in a meeting with some seriously stupid people and I would love to have those electric heart paddles to zap the ones that get on my nerves or have moronic ideas or worse, regurgitate my own ideas back to me pretending they just thought them up as if I won’t remember they were mine in the first place.

But in addition to that, I also think I am getting more engaged than I perhaps should be. I find myself caught up in the lives of the characters and when I see them faced with a problem they can’t solve, I feel I have no choice but to help. When faced with a perplexing issue like a patient with Dyskinesia, they stand around looking perplexed while I shout to the screen “Intraspinal catheter. Intraspinal catheter STAT! Duh!” And it aggravates me when they spend their time reviewing symptoms when it’s painfully obvious it’s a simple textbook case of myxopapillary ependymoma. I mean come on, all the classic signs are right there. And they keep going on about it, contemplating this and that when what they really need to do is get their surgery on and then start the patient on a course of chemo and radiation.

I also enjoy medicating my patients and keeping them loaded up on all sorts of drugs and can often be heard sprinkling my conversations with phrases like “Let them have Droperidol and Dihydroemetine”, but my absolute favorite is assisting in surgery… I encourage them and gently guide them through it… “Deep breath… Don’t worry, I GOT YO BACK, PART-NER! Now you just go on with your bad doctor self and make a large anterior lateral, mid-auxiliary incision in the 5th intercostal space.“

But seriously, if you’re an armchair surgeon like myself, I just found a fabulous website. Visible Body. It is a completely interactive 3D model of the human body that lets you dissect, and investigate the digestive system, skeletal structures, circulatory systems and all the rest.

I’m off to mess around with the Integumentary and Nervous systems. I think I may be developing a virtual God complex.

Amen and pass me a scalpel.