There is a fracture, I need to fix it...
I want to preface this by saying that this traumatologist is a very good surgeon, but ortho bros will be ortho bros.
There was this one patient with a broken wrist, a bad fracture, according to the X-ray. Due to their comorbidities, putting them under anesthesia would have been pretty high risk, but thank god for regional anesthesia: they got an axillary nerve block and it worked like a charm.
Enter ortho bro.
For the life of him he wouldn't understand why we didn't put the patient under anesthesia, when the whole procedure could have been so much faster (aka not waiting for me to do the nerve block and not waiting for it to set in). And the patient wouldn't have been moving their arm around that way.
He kept muttering louder and louder, that the patient is moving their arm. It was definitely intended for me to hear, but I pretended I didn't. Thing is, patient couldn't move their arm. The nerve block was working, and the sedation helped with the rest. But the patient is moving their arm, he can't operate like this!
It took me pretty long to realise, that he was trying to bend the arm in ways it just simply couldn't bend, according to the laws of physics, so it kept bending back to its natural state. Thus, "moving".
It went on for the rest of the OP (which he finished perfectly by the way, even though it was indeed a very bad fracture). Then came the final X-ray. He was pretty stressed out and started to lose it by then, which lead to the following. Picture this:
Ortho bro is standing with a wood-like, paralysed arm in his hands. He is trying to bend it in an absolutely impossible way once again, and once again, the arm wouldn't obey. He is visibly struggling and looks like he is losing to the laws of physics, so he starts screaming "Stop moving your hand Mr X, believe it or not I'm stronger than you. Do you hear me? I'm stronger!"
Patient was still sedated, thankfully. Me, on the other hand? I was hysterical at this point, had to leave the OR to have a good laugh behind his back.
