The Surgeon's Playlist
A fluorescent-lit operating theater at Seoul National University Hospital at 2:22 AM, where a Bluetooth speaker on the instrument tray has just paired with the wrong phone.
Dr. Yoon is forty minutes into a six-hour spinal fusion on a nineteen-year-old gymnast when the ambient piano playlist cuts out and is replaced, at full volume, by someone's downloaded episode of a true crime podcast describing a botched surgery. The anesthesiologist has frozen. The scrub nurse is reaching for the speaker but it's wedged behind the C-arm fluoroscopy unit, and unplugging it means bumping the imaging arm mid-exposure. The patient is under, vitals stable, but Dr. Yoon's hands have stopped moving. Someone could just hit play on the correct playlist from the paired phone — except that phone belongs to a resident who was sent home two hours ago and the lock screen requires Face ID.
“Call the resident, wake him up, FaceTime the unlock — I once reset my Wi-Fi from a moving taxi, this is basically the same thing.”
“We're going to video-call a sleeping man to unlock a phone so a spinal surgery can have background music? Just operate in silence like it's 1987.”
They FaceTimed the resident, who answered half-asleep, squinting into the camera at the wrong angle for eleven agonizing minutes while the true crime podcast reached a detailed autopsy segment — at which point the anesthesiologist dry-heaved into his own mask and Dr. Yoon finally just yanked the speaker's power cable, bumping the C-arm and erasing forty minutes of fluoroscopy imaging they now have to redo from scratch.
He almost had it unlocked, his eye was like 80% open — that's basically a successful Face ID in my book.
The podcast was literally describing a severed spinal cord when I decided silence was medicine.