When Gray Cat met Progressive Flo*

Res ipsa loquitur.

 *While Gray Cat has myriad fans around the globe, there are many readers who would be just as happy if I never ever mentioned her here again, much less featured her in posts like this.

I feel your pain.

Well, that's not quite true.

I mean, Bill Clinton used to say that all the time and no one really believed him but it sounded pretty good and hey, he did win reelection with it so there must be some psychological component that resonates with people.

But I digress.

Anyway, his white-footed cat was named Socks, not the most original appellation considering the circumstances.

But let's be lovers, not haters here.

The thing is, people who love cats and who have come to adore mine are quite vocal about it, while it's politically incorrect to say "I detest cats and yours most of all."

So the noise is all "Yeah, yeah, more Gray Cat, meow meow" but the silence is also full of meaning and emotion even if it can't be directly seen on screen.

It's a little like the comments on Tuesday's post about the praying resident.

Not one commenter thought UCLA did the right thing by firing the guy, and a couple people chided me for thinking at the time that it was the right thing to do.

I hope those people don't hate me for thinking that.

But I digress yet again, this time from a point I think worth making, namely that the act of praying with that patient at her request — in the minds of myself and the majority of my fellow UCLA anesthesiology faculty and residents at the time and most certainly our chairman — opened up a vista of potential horror to us that I did not see addressed anywhere by any of the commenters on this post.

What we feared after hearing the facts of the event was that this resident might — might, mind you, because there is no way in the world we could ever have learned except the hard way — logically, based, on his behavior at the patient's bedside, be inclined to stop his scientifically-based thinking in the midst of a life-threatening crisis in the OR in an anesthetized patient and instead pray for her. 

The very possibility of that happening mandated his firing. 

That was the thinking then and it might well be the thinking today.

So before you start in with how wonderful a doctor he was to feel his patient's fear and loneliness and do what he could to lessen it, consider that as an anesthesiologist his job is not to hope and pray that things go well but to use every bit of his intellect, training, and experience to make that happen.

Prayer when an anesthetized, paralyzed, intubated patient suddenly experiences a cardiac arrhythmia or oxygen desaturation and increased airway pressure has NO PLACE in the flow chart in my operating room — nor will it ever.

And you had better hope that's true if you're the patient on the table under the care of a God-fearing, born-again Christian anesthesiologist.

bookofjoe is like a box of chocolates: You just never know where a post that leads off with a picture of Gray Cat will take you.