Why I Like the (Absurd) Dancing in the OR Video
Last Thursday I was struck by a video of a woman dancing in the O.R. The Huffington Post lifestyle editor called it awesome. “Deb’s Flash Mob” lasts 6 minutes and 14 seconds. The scene takes place in an ordinary-appearing operating room. The song, Get Me Bodied, by Beyoncé, beats familiarly, throughout. And flash mobs, well, they’ve happened in all kinds of places.
What I’d never seen before – what’s news – is a furiously lively woman dancing with doctors, nurses and other others in the operating suite where she would soon undergo a bilateral mastectomy. She, the patient, is shaking and grooving. She’s clad in two hospital gowns, one flipped backwards (for modesty; a trick those of us who’ve been there know), a cap and hospital ID bracelets. An IV part dangles from the crook of one arm. Despite the circumstances, it looks like Deb’s having fun, smiling and, in the end – as her surgery nears, she’s thanking and hugging people who appear to be her friends, dressed in scrubs and adorned with health care accessories like stethoscopes.
As of this post, Deb’s OR Flash Mob has been viewed over 6.3 million times on YouTube. Not everyone, including a breast cancer patient and blogger I respect, loved the clip. (And I must admit it gets a bit long; at 3 minutes in, I was ready to concentrate, again, on what I’d been writing.) There are a hundred things wrong with this video, not the least of which is that if every patient were to ask for a dance party before surgery, the hospitals would lose money and (more importantly) precious operating room time. It’s a completely unreasonable, and, maybe, selfish thing to do.
But the dance party is humanizing. I’d go so far as to suggest it adds value to the Deb’s health care experience, and, remotely, might make a good outcome more likely. Why’s that? Because if the nurses and doctors, including the anesthesiologists who take care of the patient during surgery are reminded of her personality – her spirit, or spark, or whatever you want to call it – before they start monitoring and cutting, they are more likely to pay attention, to take care of her body, of which she’s relinquished control, than if they simply perceive her as a physical human container of a tumor with flesh, bones, a beating heart, lungs and other organs.
It turns out the patient is a physician, Dr. Deborah Cohan. She’s an obstetrician and AIDS researcher at UCSF. I can only infer that her position was a factor in the medical center’s indulging her request for a dance party before her mastectomy. On a Caring Bridge site, she offers few details of her circumstances. What all of us who’ve been there, after that kind of surgery, know is that the recovery isn’t always easy. Drains and all that. The dance party was a week ago tomorrow, early in the morning before the bilateral mastectomies. I hope that the patient is recovering well.
What Deb did, and I thank her for this, is offer an extreme example of patient-centered care. Among other things, she did everything possible to assure that the people caring for her perceive her as a human being who dances and enjoys music.
In reality, many and probably most breast cancer (and other) patients can barely get their legitimate questions answered about their surgery or treatment options, or have sufficient time with doctors to discuss those thoroughly. If only every doctor would “see” each patient as a vibrant human, that might help. Each of us deserves a dance party equivalent, or at least a good conversation and attention from the people we trust with our medical care.
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