THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 8, 1995 TAG: 9501060150
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Random Rambles
SOURCE: Tony Stein
LENGTH: Medium: 89 lines
``It was,'' said Ron Sisson, ``an eerie feeling.'' He was talking about holding a living, quivering human heart in his hand.
Sisson, a 47-year-old Chesapeake man, was telling about his job as a surgical assistant at Virginia Beach General Hospital. ``A surgical assistant is an extension of a surgeon's hands,'' he said. ``The surgeon can't do everything, can't hold everything.''
So assistants like Sisson are there at the operating table to perform tasks that may be routine compared to the complexity of the surgery itself, but are a demanding part of its success.
Assistants may set clamps that hold an incision open. Or they may clamp off bleeding blood vessels. Or they may sew up - suture is the medical word - the outer layers of an incision.
Or they may move vital organs during the operation so the surgeon can work. That's how come Sisson was holding the quivering heart. And the time he remembers most was different. ``Usually,'' he said, ``when I hold a heart, it's been chilled with a saline solution to cool it down for the surgery. It's inert, a cold piece of tissue. But this time, the surgery was almost over and the blood was coursing through it.
``It was quivering, and I was very conscious that I was literally holding a person's life in my hands.''
Sisson was born in Richmond, but after his parents' divorce he was raised by his grandparents and an uncle who lived in Warsaw. That's Warsaw as in the Northern Neck of Virginia, not in Poland. The uncle was a doctor. It was he who directed Sisson's interest toward medicine.
After a couple of years at Ferrum College, Sisson joined the Navy. The year was 1968. Sisson went to medical corpsman's school, and 45 of the 50 members of his class were given duty with Marine Corps units in Vietnam. Sisson and four others entered surgical technology training.
The focus was on operating room procedure, like how to pass instruments properly. Sisson did a show-and-tell for me:
``You slap the instrument into the doctor's hand. Not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to let him know the instrument is there. He may not be looking when you pass it to him.''
In the TV and movie scenes I see, they always repeat the name of the instrument. ``Forceps,'' the doctor says. ``Forceps,'' the instrument-passer says, and the operation moves on. They don't always do that in real life, Sisson says.
In 1971, Sisson entered an operating room training program at Norfolk General Hospital, now Sentara Norfolk General. It was there that he learned the skills he uses - clamping, suturing, being the extension of the surgeon's arm that he talks about. As when he might reach into the chest cavity and turn the heart while the surgeon works. The heart has four chambers so it might need to be repositioned. ``You don't hold it hard enough to squeeze,'' Sisson said. ``You just sort of coddle it.''
A heart was dropped on a recent TV show, and Sisson said he's never seen that happen in real life. But about 20 years ago, he was in the operating room when the surgeon dropped a kidney. Another surgical assistant who was on the plump side burst forward and used his ample stomach to pin the kidney against the table before it hit the floor. It was cleaned up and transplanted as scheduled. The story reminded me that a Norfolk doctor, only half-kidding, told me once that the most dreaded word in the operating room was ``oops.''
From 1971 to 1975, Sisson worked at Norfolk General. From '75 to '87, he was at Chesapeake General and he's been at Virginia Beach General since 1987.
The images most of us have of operating rooms are built on those TV and movie scenes and they range all the way from drama to comedy. The truth leans more to the serious side, Sisson said, but there are light moments. ``Yes, there's humor,'' Sisson said, ``but it's less about jokes than it is about relieving the stress and tension.''
One of the most tense moments he knows of is when a heart operation is winding up and the patient is taken off the pump that has kept him or her alive during the surgery. ``That's when the patient is most vulnerable,'' Sisson said. ``That's when you wonder if the heart will start and hope that it does. Then it starts quivering and you know it's OK. It's kind of dramatic.''
But Sisson has been part of the surgical team when patients have died. I asked him how that affected him emotionally.
``Sometimes you're helpless,'' he said. ``The surgical team did everything it could, but all the skill, all the knowledge sometimes fails. The comfort you feel is in knowing that everybody did their best.''
That's the dark side. Then, thankfully, there are the other times. Like the man near death after an artery in his heart ruptured. ``The surgeon was able to repair it, and the next day the man was sitting up looking fine,'' Sisson said.
``That's pretty awesome. It's a joyous feeling to have been a part of it.'' by CNB