Peter Morris – a happily retired anaesthetist

Times change. Historically anaesthetists were quiet and retiring. The surgeons were the extroverts. The anaesthetist would confine himself to discouraging the latter’s wilder enthusiasms or stiffening his resolve if things were going badly.

As a somewhat happy-go-lucky anaesthetist in England, Holland, Norway and Scotland for many a year, I began in those distant days when there were no electronic monitoring devices to speak of, so that you had to stand at the patient’s head, watch their breathing and their colour and keep your finger on the pulse. The revolution in electronic gadgetry though – where numbers are displayed on a huge screen and things peep if something drifts off – allows you nowadays to sit on one side and attend to writing your book.

This has also been aided by modern surgical practice. When using chloroform or ether, operating time was very limited and surgeons had to be quick. The excellence of modern anaesthesia has ushered in the surgical tortoise, such that an operation which might reasonably take fifteen minutes, will now often drag on for a couple of hours. The ‘up’ side is that instead of hurriedly scratching a paragraph or two, you might now see off three or four well-executed pages. I once asked a surgeon – as we were about to start on a complex head and neck case – how long he would be? He replied, ‘Peter, this is what you might call a three-chapter case.’

One surgeon asked me quite recently, ‘Peter, how is it that you can put someone to sleep in forty-five seconds, whilst Doctor C takes forty-five minutes?’ I replied, ‘Alastair, how is it that you can repair a tendon in fifteen minutes when some of your colleagues take two hours or more?’

The old-salt theatre technicians were a regular stimulus to creativity. One said to the bruiser with a flattened nose, cauliflower ear and huge muscles; ‘What’s your line of business, Sir?’ ‘I’m a boxer.’ ‘Oh, do you work for Amazon?’ And a top-notch technician would actually do most of the work, leaving you free to get on with your novel.

On the less humorous side were one’s dealings with screw-turning and politically-attuned executives, who could squeeze all the life and fun out of things and administrators who – it was whispered – once gave Stalin lessons in terror-tactics and also taught his provincial kulaks the art of rigging quotas and bluffing that they were observing the tyrant’s total-control methods. An old Russian lady once said to me, ‘We knew all about dodging the rules and looking after one another.’ I said, ‘With those talents, you ought to be in N.H.S. management.’

In my view the general attitude to health-care – as with many other things – has become far too screw-ball, hung-up and political. When I worked in Stirling in the eighties, sometimes in the evenings, I would swap over with the surgeon. He would give the dope and I would do the appendicectomy. Imagine that today? They would have your balls for breakfast.

Or the old Scot, who was my boss when a house-surgeon. ‘So, Mr O’Hara, you have gall-stones? Why did you not attend when listed for your hernia repair?’ The Irishman beamed. ‘Ah, I was invoited to Clare to shoot, so I was.’ After nodding sagely, the surgeon replied. ‘So, you were invited to Clare to shoot? Don’t waste my time. Get out.’

And still farther back, as a student, I was assisting with an abdominal operation. The surgeon said that here it was particularly important to maintain a bloodless field. Ten minutes later we were shovelling it out with both hands. Eventually he got it under control and said, ‘Ah, no more bleeding.’ The anaesthetist said, ‘No, it’s all in the swabs.’

As a police surgeon, nothing special happened, but the windscreen sticker ‘Association of British Police Surgeons’ at least kept traffic wardens from popping yellow bits of paper under one’s wipers. One honest remark though, sticks in my mind. The sergeant asked her, ‘But why did you let him do it?’ She replied, ‘Because I liked it.’

Plenty of material for a work of ‘fiction’.

How dare I spill such beans? Will the bling-laden medical top-brass not be out with their twelve-bores? Well, I am retired and so I trust out of range. They will grind their teeth, though in public declare blithely that this here is pure poppycock. Believe not a word of it. This is what happens, though today perhaps, it is less conspicuous as we all play the game of being ‘passionate’ and concerned.

I like …

Talking, even if no one enjoys listening. As my daughter once put it, ‘Package: comedian plus audience.’

I both liked and disliked …

Spending a year in France dodging bankruptcy.

I dislike …

Pretence and this nauseating phrase ‘health-care professionals’. Pass the bucket.

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Peter Morris’s ‘Scalpels Out’, priced at £10.00.