Horn Honking

"YOU'RE IN... SCRUB UP!"

One of the best most memorable parts about driving to Roseau is the way that drivers love to use their horns on the road. I don’t know about you, but I am not afraid to use my horn whenever a driver passes me on the road back in the states, as the driver decides to almost slice the front bumper off my car with a not-so-slick pass on the expressway. However, in Dominica, although this can happen (Now, I’m thinking that being horn happy came as an after effect of the invention of the automobile), I’ve seen Dominican drivers use their horns for many reasons, such as:

1. It could be social: some bus drivers, when passing through the smaller towns, honk their horns and then wave to the people on the streets.

2. It could be out of courtesy: I’ve seen some bus drivers decide to use their horn to let someone know they could pass.

3. It could be for business: If I'm walking down the street by the bus depot in Roseau. Every single van's horn starts honking for me, to win me over in the bus-filling race that occurs there. (Although I'm flattered, I still pick the nicest looking van... I like the one with tiger-skinned upholstery. :P)

4. Most importantly... It sometimes could be attraction: like the Dominican driver that honks at women while he’s waiting to “pick them up” to take them back to Portsmouth... :D.

IT JUST SEEMS sometimes it seems that these customs are crazy to us in America. But what matters the people in Dominica have it work for them, and it works (yes, even purpose number 4... sometimes.)

How the heck does this relate to medicine?

Like I said in my last entry, one of my good colleagues, Alex, jumped in on a herniaplasty a few weeks ago in the Operating Room (actually, in Dominica its termed the Operating Theatre). Six of us med students were standing in our wide spectrum of scrubs - anywhere from "poop-like" brown (me) to a torquoise green (him). All of a sudden, the surgeon comes out and points at Alex and says, "You're in... scrub up!"

Bada bing and bada boom... He's ready to go. There he was standing in an operating room gown, with long latex gloves, pumping his hands in the air as if he was ready to take on a patient. And, he was in...

But there's a caveat... As soon as he had the handles on the tools, there was the doctor tapping Alex's hands on the forceps, and there my colleague was... caught completely off guard, semi-frozen. I really understand how he felt, because although the surgeon was telling him something, he had no idea what the surgeon meant by his friendly gesture. The surgeon then took my friends hands and placed them in the right position with the forceps around the suture in the right position. The doctor went over to the nurse, and also did the same tapping motion, and bam!, she was out there with the right suture string and placed it into the hands of the doctor, and I wondered how they figured it out so quickly...

It seemed that after many hours of working together, the nurse and the doctor somehow knew what every single gesture meant. Instead of taking precious seconds off of the clock to verbalize their intentions, those seconds went to use more efficiently ( a good case especially when circulation to a limb is cut off - precious seconds that could mean the difference between recovery to normal use of an arm or necessary amputation). That seems to be part to the art of medicine... finding ways to communicate make procedures more efficient and effective, using our creativity to its potential... and they're definitely not textbook, and even may seem crazy, by all means.

But remember: It got the job done.