I have this past week spent a full day back in theatre, as staff not a patient . Long, long gone are my days of spending 8+ hours a day at an operating table. After a year of trying to find some middle ground in my role I have spent today being what I joked as ‘the queen mother’ to a complex surgical case in a speciality which I have some management responsibility for.

It got called the queen mother because I sat on a stool in the corner of an operating theatre dropping the occasional gem of knowledge, supportive word or dry humour (some things never change) and waiting for drinks to arrive seeing as I can’t carry one.

I was able to impart some wisdom across the team. The entire day I spent in there my non functional arm and hand strapped to me.

Using my working arm I did try to help on the odd occasion.

For the majority of the day I felt either in the way, surplus or envious that I couldn’t really participate. Before trudging out at the end.

It feels like a 20 year career wasted.

I had a history of being a great scrub practitioner, a fount of knowledge and willingness to do complex surgical work with complex people on complex patients, and you know what? I was bloody good at it. I won awards, I was thanked in published books, I was live streamed globally as part of a conference I helped organise.

At one point watching the team work it really hit me that my career was pretty much done. Yes we’ve adapted the role to use my knowledge but the biggest part of the role died along with that big section of my brain. I could have cried, no, I could have sobbed and screamed, theoretically I had another 30+ years ahead of me. I’d always expected to be scrubbed until the day I retired.

I could have done so much more, I was a high achiever, I feel like all that potential has been lost, squandered by ill-health as a consequence of other people’s actions.

Then as much as it makes me sad and quite bitter a little piece of me starts to think wider and think about my patients, staff, department and hospital and the impact me not being able to work clinically has had on those things.

Yes I’ll never know those hypothetical things and I know that I shouldn’t dwell on it but I feel it’s useful for me to recognise my health hasn’t just impacted me.

Sequal to follow

But I'm all in pieces, sick as all my secrets
Still now how they weigh on my mind
🎶- Still Waiting, Tim Chaplin, 2016