Editor’s Page: Heeding the Call

When I was in third grade I had surgery for the first time. Surgeons performed a tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy, a procedure that is also known — much to the delight of my more crude and immature classmates — as a T&A. In fact, I can’t stop picturing Jay “J Dog” Burmeister, a classmate who was held back a few years and who had a field day with the acronym, as I write this.

A tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy is one of the safest and most common procedures performed on pediatric patients under the age of 15.

More than half a million of these surgeries are performed each year — the overwhelming majority of which are done on an outpatient basis.

When I was nine, however, things were a little bit different in health care.

It wasn’t so long ago that the surgeon smoked a cig while he briefed me and my folks on what was about to happen (the good ol’ days according to my two-pack-a-day grandmom). It was still the late 80s, though. That meant I had to spend the night in the hospital.

The entire episode was a nightmare scenario for nine-year-old me.

I was terrified to, as my Uncle Carmen put it, “go under the knife.” Prior to my procedure, my classmates said their goodbyes to me like I was heading off to war, all while J Dog told me (probably) fabricated stories about the many, many surgeries he’d heard about going terribly wrong.

Bringing my security blanket — a pathetically threadbare piece of yellow fabric I, apparently lacking inspiration or creativity, named “Blanky” — did nothing to calm my frazzled nerves. By the time I was ready to go under anesthesia, my wild imagination had gotten the better of me, and I was convinced the T&A would be the end of me.

“What if the anesthesia doesn’t work, and I feel everything and I mean E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G when they’re cutting me up and the pain is so bad that I have a heart attack and die right there on that stupid table before I even turn 10 and get a chance to hit a home run or dunk a basketball?”

These were the types of fears I shared with the Buddhist-calm nurse who held my hand, rubbed my back and somehow managed to keep me from making a break for my freedom before the “mask of death” put me under.

For the life of me, I can’t remember anything about my T&A surgeon, but I’ll never forget the kindness of the nurse who cared for me preoperatively.

I’m sure that sentiment makes sense to Victoria Hammond, one of the authors of this month’s cover story on pediatric care. After all, the nurses Ms. Hammond encountered during her own teenage surgeries inspired her enough that she decided to embark on a career in pediatric OR nursing. Andrea Dyer, the other August cover story author, has described her own career as a calling. In this month’s cover story, readers will hear all about the aspects of caring for younger patients that apply to populations of all ages.

As for J Dog Burmeister, someone whom I hadn’t thought about in decades prior to working on this column, nostalgia got the better of me. I felt compelled to find out what happened to this memorable character from my past.

After a cursory social media search proved futile, I went into reporter mode (i.e., I called a few acquaintances I knew who believed in keeping track of grade-school and high-school peers as though it were a religion). Turns out Jay moved out to Los Angeles, changed his name and went into the adult film industry (“His work is allegedly more on the artistic side of the biz,” my source told me). Looking back on my memories of Jay, it seems like J Dog was following his own version of a calling, too. OSM