On the ground floor of UCSF Long Hospital, down a hall, around a corner, down and then up an oddly placed ramp is the Endoscopy unit. The end of this meandering route couldn’t me more an appropriate location to perform the unique spelunking procedures navigating the caverns of patient’s bowels with a sterilized endoscope.
The unit has a factorial efficiency, with a large room used for admission preparations and recovery monitoring. There are four procedure rooms where the physicians will send the scope down the throat or up the bottom to explore, take pictures, or biopsy with a claw-like jaw that slices bowels bits.
I had the pleasure of observing four separate procedures and as I hopped from room to room, seeing open throats and exposed behinds I was mostly amazed at the unique expertise required of the endoscopy physician jumping from room to room, arriving after the patient has been sedated and therefore blessed with a limited experience of patient interaction made primarily of a Blair-witch style camera view of the patient’s innards. These physicians have invested a good 10 years of their youth in an academic career to end up being camera wielding bowel spelunkers.
It is hardly admirable or glamorous and I’m sure that the repetition hour after hour, day after day, has numbed them to the strangeness of what it is that they are doing.
