When my nursing colleagues and I get to talking about how OR nursing was in the good old days, we're always struck by how far we've come.

Those were the days
The first stapler I?saw in the OR was all metal and it had to be taken apart to be cleaned. Then it was reassembled, wrapped and sterilized. Surgeons would see red if it wasn't put together correctly. This metal pain in the tuchus had a tendency to misfire and then fall apart in their hands. I used to hold my breath praying the thing would stay together. Many a TA 30, 60 and 90 were sent crashing into a tiled wall.

Cataract patients stayed the night, made to lay flat with a sand bag by their head. Cauterization was a huge green generator and a grounding pad that was nothing more than a metal plate that you covered in gel and stuck to the patient's butt.

Suction containers were made of clear thick glass with a thick black rubber stopper. We cleaned them after surgery and then put them in the autoclave. If you're a gagger like me, you could easily lose both breakfast and lunch. Suction tubing was thick yellow or amber rubber that the circulator and scrub had to clean and wrap every afternoon.

Clamp, cut and tie
Hemostats were put on everything and the more the better. We never counted them unless it was to impress our colleagues at break with how important our surgery was by the number of clamps we used. And the number of needles used was important, too. We sharpened our needles with steel wool and stored them in a rack. Every room had its own rack. We counted our used needles stuck in a green towel instead of those red plastic boxes. The suture was cotton, plain, chromic or silk. Chromic was packaged in alcohol and you stretched it slightly to loosen the tinsel strength before threading the needles. We learned to thread the needles and pass them to the surgeon.

Everything was green. All our drapes, wrappers, gowns and scrubs were green cotton cloth. They were disposed of in cloth linen bags and washed in the hospital laundry. We wrapped everything in those wrappers: instruments, laps and tubing.

Knee scopes were performed with direct visualization looking through the scope. Graspers and punch forceps haven't changed a whole lot. And everything was soaked in Cidex.

Glass syringes were wrapped in gauze and we put spinal trays together ourselves for sterilization. We soaked anesthesia tubing and masks made of black rubber and dried them to use again.

Patients used to be admitted to the hospital the night before surgery. Total joints were told to bathe with hexachlorophene several days before. We shaved patients in about every area that remotely had hair. Right before going to surgery, in the pre-op area, the extremity was washed in providone-iodine detergent and then wrapped in sterile green towels, only to be washed and painted again in the OR right before draping. And it seemed like everyone got the dreaded hospital 3H (high, hot, helluvalot) enema.

The few, the proud
Long ago, nursing was considered more of a punchline than a profession. Nurses were reputed to be drunks with obnoxious behaviors. Today, every nursing specialty has a week of celebration dedicated to it. I, of course, am partial to operating room nursing and never let a chance go by without talking about my profession. When asked what I do for a living, I specifically say, "I am an operating room nurse."