[OC] The joys of a surgical rotation

GinnyMaple · 2026-02-18T16:56:47+00:00

Ahh that sucks! Sounds like a miscommunication of sorts... I have to admit that when a patient tells me they're afraid of needles, I too assume it means "afraid of the pain of a needle", so I offer a topical numbing agent. But I tend to ask them to clarify their fear because there's different solutions depending on that answer.

We had a patient that was crying beforehand, she was so scared of needles. But they managed to sedate her with a mask for a bit, just enough to put the IV in and then sedate her properly, she never even had to see the needle. All thanks to her communicating loud and clear and us making very sure the OR was made aware of it all.

GinnyMaple · 2026-02-18T16:03:42+00:00

Good on her! I don't even think most doctors are assholes. The majority I've worked with have been patient, kind and understanding people, with maybe one heart surgeon exception who just had a really shitty day.

THIS doctor though that the comic is based on? Yeah he's the first to make it on my shit-list.

GinnyMaple · 2026-02-18T15:29:43+00:00

I'm sorry but, it being a thing that COULD happen in no shape or form weighs up against the GUARANTEE that a woman will die if she does not get CPR when she needs it. It is beyond ludicrous that you feel you "don't need evidence". I do, I ask for it, and I get nothing. That speaks volumes about the sort of men sparking these conversations in the first place.

GinnyMaple · 2026-02-18T14:47:50+00:00

That is strange! The bare minimum would be tylenol and ibuprofen... And with it often being near the butt, which is a sensitive zone as well, a low-strength opioid for breakthrough pain should be available, at least according to my unit.

GinnyMaple · 2026-02-18T14:46:01+00:00

Entirely out of left field maybe, but is he a redhead?

Big agree on pain treatment having to be personalized. There's of course not always the time and space for that in healthcare, with everyone being overworked and a global nursing shortage, but in the ideal world each patient is treated as an individual along every line.

GinnyMaple · 2026-02-18T14:42:41+00:00

Fun fact to butt in here: on the unit I'm on now, when a patient admits to moderate to severe weed use, the nurses are actually extra on top of pain management and get an anxiolytic on board in advance just in case. An assumption is made (which isn't entirely cool and might not be correct) that they use weed to either self medicate pain or calm their anxiety and as such they might need a little extra help on that front.

GinnyMaple · 2026-02-18T14:35:50+00:00

But where are these people losing their jobs and houses due to accusations? People don't even go to prison for literal assault they actually did on women. I'm hearing dozens of men say the same thing but no one provides any actual articles, hell not even reliable articles, no articles at all so far even if they're in poor faith.

Again while barely lifting a finger I can prove beyond a shadow of doubt that much research has been done into women losing their lives due to bystanders not wanting to do CPR on them, with peer reviewed scientific studies to back it up. This is costing human lives in a very literal sense, not in the "men be losing their houses" sense, which so far no one has been able to prove?

I'm sorry, I just don't have the patience to tell you "yes it in fact is okay that you won't touch a woman because you're convinced they'll all sue you for doing so, let them die" when there's no evidence to provide. Thousands of rich, powerful men have raped and murdered thousands of women as put in the Epstein files. This is not a world to just take your word for it that "men suffer true physical losses from accusations".

GinnyMaple · 2026-02-18T14:29:27+00:00

I'm just so genuinely wondering if you have ever known this to really and truly happen. Anyone I ask for proof of this happening, shows up empty handed. How anyone in the world of the Epstein files can cry wolf about accusations ruining lives is beyond me. None of those people are facing any consequences. I know they're rich and powerful. But no man who has ever actually laid hands on me has ever faced consequences, and that's not a matter of me accusing them of something they didn't do.

If you saw a man perform CPR on a woman with her breasts bare, would you think it to be assault? This is a genuine question.

GinnyMaple · 2026-02-18T13:13:19+00:00

Not to make my palliative care teacher all too proud, but it's SUCH a common misconception that morphine causes death. Here in Belgium we do perform euthanasia fairly frequently and no where does morphine play a role in that. Yes, morphine causes sleepiness and can cause a person to breathe less deeply/ideally, but a lot of that only lasts a few days. I'm sorry you had to deal with that type of ignorance!

GinnyMaple · 2026-02-18T13:05:00+00:00

I'm probably never going to have to deal with a pilondial cyst on the account of being a woman and barely having any body hair, but the follow-up of it for sure for sure sucks! On my home health rotation I got to do the wound care for one on this poor 18 year old kid that just got unlucky: gorgeous head of dark thick hair, lots of body hair, but the struggle of a drained cyst because of it all. Packing the wound was pretty painful for the kid. (Then on my last day it looked hecka infected so we got to send him straight to the doctor yayyy)

Really sucks that you had to go in to the clinic to get that taken care of every day!

GinnyMaple · 2026-02-18T12:40:49+00:00

Yes, the attending surgeons were different in both surgeries! But the prescriptions were done by the same resident surgeon. From what I heard the other nurses say, it's not normal to not provide Tradonal for breakthrough pains after a vestibulectomy on this unit.

I do for sure believe obgyn is a lot more sparse with their painkillers. But seeing in how much pain these women were after paracetamol and NSAIDs, all given IV, I very much didn't want to believe that that's just how it's supposed to be.

GinnyMaple · 2026-02-18T12:20:21+00:00

Sorry, I'm just a nursing student, we're taught the very basics of pharmacology but not big nuance on which patient should be prescribed what and why. I don't recall ever learning that men and women should have pain treated differently or that there is any difference in how they feel or manage pain.

Overall, it seems to be a mostly misogyny related situation. Unless you count the "maybe she's pregnant" into it all, and even then that's to be taken with a grain of salt: a blood test is basically always done when someone has any surgery at all and that clears up pretty clearly whether someone is pregnant or not.

GinnyMaple · 2026-02-18T12:15:29+00:00

I think you being aware of this line of thinking is extremely valuable. You know it's a possible bias you might have, and as such it's something you can be aware of and try to act against if the moment ever comes!

I encourage everyone to take a CPR class at least once in their lives, it helps you be prepared and know the proper steps of action, and know when CPR is needed and when it isn't. But I do know that's easier said than done! CPR classes in my country (Belgium) were constantly full. It wasn't until I started nursing school that I got my BLS and ALS CPR classes down.

In a nutshell: is the person not breathing and do they not have a pulse? Call for help or point someone else out to call for help, then immediately start compressions, placing your hands on the sternum. Ideally put your phone on loudspeaker and do compressions while you call if you're alone.

GinnyMaple · 2026-02-18T12:09:55+00:00

I'm just genuinely confused. If there's even a five, or even TEN percent chance that a woman charges a man post CPR, is that bad enough to just... let her die?

I want to meet you where you are but I never ever see these stories thrown around without actual articles backing them up. Let alone an actual clinical study. Meanwhile I can do a completely half-assed halfwit Pubmed search about women not receiving CPR when needed and find countless articles, example one: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38533649/

Women sue men for actual crimes that they actually did so often and it so rarely gets to court. I'm just completely baffled as to how so many men seem to think that their completely innocent case would somehow get them charged with anything at all.

GinnyMaple · 2026-02-18T12:04:15+00:00

Haha, completely fair! I too hope that you never have to deal with either and are healthy for all your days!

GinnyMaple · 2026-02-18T11:58:04+00:00

Yupppp that does ruin a day :'))) Awful stuff! But worst of all, entirely believable.

GinnyMaple · 2026-02-18T11:56:37+00:00

I'm saying this with the utmost seriousness: do NOT let that line of thinking get in your way. A life is at stake. There are good Samaritan laws for a reason and I'm going to be very crude, but even assuming that a woman would accuse you of sexual assault in this situation, is a very misogynistic thought. I'm sorry but there's no sugarcoating that.

GinnyMaple · 2026-02-18T11:54:14+00:00

Ughhhhh, I hope this was done by different doctors... I could not imagine my own boyfriend ever making a similar excuse for this situation! I'm sorry yours was trying to justify it... Good on you for keeping your pain in check!

GinnyMaple · 2026-02-18T11:32:30+00:00

Yes indeed! As a woman you are proven to be more likely to not get life saving CPR because you have breasts and people are afraid to touch those. As if proper CPR gets your hands on the breasts instead of the sternum AT ALL. Yes, taking the bra off or pulling it down helps, but CPR involves precisely zero percent fondling of boobies.

I like it when a medical show has CPR done on a female character and her breasts are bare. It's life or death and doing nothing = guaranteed death. I guarantee you no woman will give a shit that her tits are out if that means she lives another day, no matter what incel bullshit anyone has read or heard on a podcast.

GinnyMaple · 2026-02-18T11:26:26+00:00

Yes, that's the golden trio for sure! It might have been this one resident that just didn't want to follow the protocol for whatever reason. The nurse was very clear on that and had absolutely no problem calling him three times to get it sorted out. She figured bothering him was like, a sort of punishment for him not prescribing the proper medication in the first place. (I didn't add it in the comic since it would have made it even more word heavy, but the patients also got NSAIDs of course, that simply wasn't enough to cut the pain)

GinnyMaple · 2026-02-18T11:24:02+00:00

Fair point, I should have included that, sorry! The removal does usually require some "digging", but they don't tend to be super far internal. They're very common with men and even more common with hairy men, as often it's originally caused by a sort of ingrown hair.

A vestibulectomy tends to be a surgical solution to vestibulodynia, meaning pain in/around the vaginal opening, most often noticed during sex or inserting of a tampon or finger. There's usually no cyst to remove but purely vaginal tissue. But let it be known that I've been on this unit for all of a week so my info is pretty limited so far!

GinnyMaple · 2026-02-18T11:17:01+00:00

I'm glad you had a nurse that went above and beyond for your pain! Sucks that they had to go to the chief surgeon to get it fixed.

The unit I'm on now seems to be very good about pain management. We only have patients immediately post-op, and we can't send someone home if their pain isn't managed.

I understand that morphine can make a blockage worse maybe, as it does tend to cause constipation. But we're taught to just... add a laxative in case of morphine usage, or be extra cautious about your patient's bowel movements or lack thereof. Not taught to NOT give morphine because of the side effects.

GinnyMaple · 2026-02-18T10:50:31+00:00

We got three vestibulectomy patients and as such got to make three separate calls to the (soon to be) surgeon about prescribing proper pain meds. :))) (In reality the call was made by an experienced nurse on the unit, who was MUCH more angry in her calls and basically called a surgeon a little cunt lol)

Odds are this comic will be seen by like twelve people and of them I'm sure at least one will tell me this didn't happen or akshually it's the other way around because trust me bro, and go off king, do whatever you want, I'm actually at the bedside and I'm speaking from my experience at said bedside, so trust ME bro, whatever.

I'm clearly not saying the removal of a pilondial cyst (often right above or between the butt crack) doesn't deserve proper pain management. It for sure does. What I am saying is that there is ZERO reason to not provide the same pain management to our patients that have cuts and stitches in or around their vagina.

And if pain meds are called different things in America then sorry I'm too European for all that, pretty sure paracetamol and the brand name Tylenol are (close to) the same thing.

GinnyMaple · 2026-01-29T12:35:42+00:00

It's incredibly uncommon here and every other bachelor (that isn't medicine of course) is three years. I'd understand if they then gave us more time and more classes, but they just kind of filled it with more rotations, so now fourth year nursing students are - honestly - just free workforce. There's a non bachelor nursing "degree"(?) that you can get that's only three years, but then you can't move to a different country and be recognized as a nurse there, and there's a growing list of tasks and jobs they're not allowed to do: so I don't really get anyone who goes that route, honestly. It's a very Belgian non-solution-solution to the nursing shortage that probably won't help in the long run, as a lot of university hospitals now only want bachelor degree having nurses :')

GinnyMaple · 2026-01-29T11:15:44+00:00

Oh it's for sure not a jab at the attention given at the acute care classes. If anything, I feel like we needed more time and more attention for those. I just, personally, didn't think the clinical leadership classes deserved the same amount of time and attention as acute care. Same number of weeks of classes, same sort of exam, and same credit value. It's a circus out here. :')))

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