Surgeons can be so cutting

SOME of my best friends are surgeons, but there’s no escaping the fact they have a reputation for arrogance.

Now a medical anthropologist, Dr Laura Jones, appears to confirm this with her investigation of what really goes on in an operating theatre once the patient is unconscious.

She found rampant egos at play and concluded that one in every 40 interactions between theatre staff is an altercation or argument.

As a junior doctor, I hated going into theatre for this reason. I was in perpetual fear of doing something wrong and being shouted at. My most humiliating moment came when a surgeon instructed me to hold my arms out as I stood alongside an anaesthetised patient whom he’d just cut open.

The surgeon proceeded to pile some of the patient’s vital organs into my outstretched arms, with a warning not to move. As the minutes ticked by I had a horrible realisation: my trousers — surgical scrubs are always too big — were sliding down.

I tried to move my legs wider apart to stop them. ‘For God’s sake, man, why are you standing like that?’ the surgeon barked.

My trousers were round my knees and I was posed like a sumo wrestler. The theatre staff were in hysterics. That was my last appearance in theatre.