Free Confessions of a Male Nurse by Michael Alexander Page B

urology patients that nearly every man over fifty knew of him. The old men only talked good of Dr Baker, and I can’t say that I blame them. He was the only urology surgeon that the city had, and he had saved a lot of lives and improved the quality of many more.
    The New Zealand government had decided that the urology waiting list needed urgent attention. Many elderly men were pottering around their homes with a tube up their penis for more than a year, and during that year, many of these men had also presented to the local emergency room with blocked catheters, urine infections, bleeding, or a combination of all three.
    The solution was simple. We got funding for 40 extra prostate operations, which would need to be performed over three weeks, on top of an already full surgery list.
    Forty prostate operations is a huge amount to undertake in three weeks. Performing this many would keep two or even three normal urology surgeons busy for that time. It isn’t just a matter of doing the actual surgery; it’s also a case of making sure patients recover with as few complications as possible.
    The ward only had 26 beds. Considering a common stay for a prostate operation was between four and seven days (and that doesn’t take into account the extended stays due to complications such as excessive bleeding or infection), this certainly seemed a tight schedule. It was nice of the government to give us the money, but it would have been nicer still if they’d given us some additional doctors and nursing staff to get us through those three weeks. Instead, all operating fell upon the shoulders of Dr Baker.
    Dr Baker went into a prostatic trimming frenzy. He would begin operating at seven in the morning and when five o’clock came around he just kept on snipping away. Time meant nothing to him – he continued to operate well into the night. He reminded me of Dr Frankenstein working feverishly in his lab. The theatre staff said they had never seen him quite like this before, he was manic – and even more-short tempered than usual.
    With such a large volume of patients being put through the system, the amount of work for the nursing staff, as well as the junior doctors, was also immense. We were overrun with patients. Everywhere I looked I could see them comparing notes, deciding whose urine looked the least blood stained and whose the most. The old boys were pottering around cautiously, always careful not to stretch their urine bags too far, get tangled up in the tubing, or forget the whole thing altogether. It always made me cringe with sympathy whenever I saw someone forget their catheter bag and then be literally pulled up short by their manhood.
    To make matters even worse, we still had other non-urological patients to care for. There were still the odd general surgical patients as well as the medical patients, plus two days a week we had to take new patients from the emergency room. I had a tough job making sure I didn’t forget about my non-surgical patients, but there was one person who felt the brunt of the frenzy more than anyone.
    Lisa was the urology registrar working under Dr Baker. She had been working for him for six months as part of her surgical rotation and she was having a pretty tough time of it. The problem was not just the work, but because she was female. Everyone knew Dr Baker was irritable with his female staff.
    ‘I can’t keep on like this. There’s too much work to do for one doctor,’ Lisa declared.
    Lisa was in tears after the Saturday morning ward round. Lisa wasn’t the first and definitely wasn’t the last female doctor to cry after a ward round with Dr Baker. At his best, he was barely tolerant of women, but in the event that something was not done his way, then any woman involved would get a verbal battering. I’d sometimes make the same mistake as a female colleague, like leaving the catheter tubing on top of a patient’s leg, instead of under it, and he wouldn’t say a thing.
    No one knew