During my last on-call, I had a 20 year-old patient with a large inguinal hernia (a condition where the intestines get trapped in the scrotum due to a defect in muscle ring in that area) for emergency operation as he was starting to have pain in the balls. Anyway, since the operation was to be done way down there, I gave him spinal anaesthesia (half body anaesthesia where the patient feels numb and pain-free from waist downwards but is still awake). We put a cloth screen between him and the area of surgery so that the surgical field will remain sterile and more importantly, so that the patient won’t be able to see what is going on down there and freak out.
As the surgeon was about to start, the patient did freak out and started to feel nervous and anxious, so I decided to give him a little bit of sedation and to make small talk to distract him. While chatting about random stuff from his current work to how his ex-girlfriend ran off after he planned to get engaged to her, he suddenly got excited as the radio started playing his favourite songs and thus he started singing in the OT. He literally sang song after song for the next 1 hour much to the amusement of everyone.
Apart from that, he also managed to educate me about the cockroach. He told me that the reason spraying cockroaches doesn’t really kill them is because their lungs are below on their underside, and thus there’s no point in spraying their oil-proof back cum wings. He said if the cockroach actually stopped moving after being sprayed, it is a scam and that the roach is not really dead but just acting. The next thing you know, after you’ve turned your back, the roach would have ran off. He later told me that his uncle sells a special type of pest control drug which you paint on the ground like a moat around the room/house and when the cockroach walks past it, it will absorb into the lungs and kill it.
And there I was pondering, do cockroaches have lungs?
Hmmm…
Anyway, turned out the guy was still singing in the recovery area and even on the way out of the OT. Perhaps the sedation finally kicked in and he got a little “high”…
