Learn to compartmentalize for best surgical results
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After a busy day of doing surgery, a friend asked me why I felt so drained.
After all, he surmised, each surgery is brief, and you are even sitting down while you operate. He did some quick math and said that even at 10 minutes a surgery, doing two dozen cases should amount to just about 4 hours of work. What he did not take into account was the intense concentration required to perform such delicate and unforgiving surgery. A slight mismove of just a millimeter is the difference between a successful surgery and a complication that can affect the patient’s vision forever.
Certainly, performing ocular surgery is stressful. Our surgery will change the way our patients see the world every waking moment for the rest of their lives. On the day of surgery, for our patients, the most important thing is the success of their procedure and the restoration of clear vision. We have to respect that and also make their surgical success our No. 1 priority during their procedure. This requires the surgeon to be able to compartmentalize.
Ophthalmic surgeons are regular people with lives that are full of typical challenges. No one has a perfect life: There are up and downs, easy parts and challenges, and good times and bad. That is the nature of life, and at any given time, we are all juggling a myriad of personal problems, health issues, relationship challenges, business complexities and more. There are a lot of great times in life, and there are also plenty of tough times. In essence, life is a zero-sum game with the amazing positives usually offset by matching downsides. You will always have many things going on at once.
Source: Uday Devgan, MD
Despite having many distractions and challenges in other aspects of your life, when you are performing surgery on a patient, those precious minutes must be focused solely on achieving the best surgical outcome. During the case, the only things that matter are that patient, this eye, your hands and the surgery. We must learn to compartmentalize so that we can give every patient our best.
Compartmentalizing means that we will focus only on the task at hand. Any other issues that are inducing stress in your life need to be put away into separate compartments to be dealt with later. You cannot waste any of your bandwidth on these other issues while you are concentrating on performing delicate ocular surgery. Accept that there are plenty of challenging issues for you to deal with, but then resolve that while you are in the operating room this morning, all of that will have to wait. Take a moment to clear your thoughts, close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, relax your shoulders and refocus on the task at hand.
Remember that some of our patients, who are also going through many of life’s challenges, may not have the same ability to compartmentalize. We have all seen the patient who comes into our clinic with a brazen attitude, but then later in the visit, we find out that other stressors are responsible for the hostility. We must give patients the benefit of the doubt and understand that they may not be as good at compartmentalizing. We, however, should hold ourselves to a higher standard and not allow our stressors to get the best of us.
Stress relief is also critical in the ability to compartmentalize. In particular, physical activities such as exercise, meditation or even walking outdoors can help reduce stress and enable us to better focus our energies. I insist on a good night’s sleep before surgery days, and I wake up rested and energetic. This good energy is then put into every surgery that I do, and I give every patient my very best. For every surgery that day, I make that patient’s surgery my No. 1 priority, and all other issues that I may be juggling in life are compartmentalized to be dealt with later.
For the newest generation of surgeons who went through medical school on a pass/fail basis only, without grades or scores, keep in mind that the real world is different. I have never met a patient who wanted “a passable job” for their surgery. Every patient expects perfection or close to it, and I agree wholeheartedly because I, too, want the best. And delivering your best each and every time will certainly require you to master the skill of compartmentalizing.
See full video of this topic at cataractcoach.com.
- For more information:
- Uday Devgan, MD, is in private practice at Devgan Eye Surgery and partner at Specialty Surgical Center in Beverly Hills. He can be reached at 11600 Wilshire Blvd. #200, Los Angeles, CA 90025; email: devgan@gmail.com; website: www.CataractCoach.com.
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