The vast majority of people, I believe, have no idea what anesthesiologists actually do. Many physicians, in fact, don’t really understand what we do. This is possible because you can go through medical school without ever having studied anesthesia, but you necessarily have to slog through internal medicine, psychiatry, surgery… just some days back I was in Radio Shack buying an ethernet cable and this fat Asian guy behind the counter started the conversation about college n studies and just then he made the comment to me “Wow, that’s like, so cool that you’re gona be anesthesiologist, because you'll get so much money and it’s like, so EASY!” I just smiled sweetly at that chubby little nerd and marvelled at how he could possibly think that that was a polite thing to say. To say that to someone who had practically killed herself to make it through meds school … He still has two un-torsed testicles, I imagine, but only because I’m such a nice girl.
The truth of it is, that a monkey can put someone to sleep and wake them up. Seriously, I could train a simian to know how and when to turn the gas on and off. The trouble is that most people think that that is all there is to it. But if you look even a little below the surface, you can begin to see what a lot of skill it takes to do this job. anesthesiologist take someone who is awake and breathing on their own and put them in a near-death state so that they will not feel pain and distress when the surgeon cuts them open from stem to stern. The patient is so ”deep” in this situation that they cannot breathe for themselves, so we breathe for them. We manage oxygen, carbon dioxide, sugar, fluids, pain, heart rate, blood pressure… we make sure all those lines continue to intersect at that exact point needed for life. We push drugs, make adjustments, arrange tubes and lines and padding just so. Very often the right thing needs to be done immediately if order for the patient to survive without problems. And when I'll do this job rightly , the patient wakes up and never really understands that their life was, literally, in my hands that whole time I'm sure that will be the most amazing feeling :)
Next time you have surgery, just remember that about your anesthesiologist. They are keeping all those lines intersecting in space, not just turning the gas on and off.
