A Person By Any Other Name...

We're required to do a lot of education at work.  The medical field is always changing and requiring many "mandatory" inservice  requirements.  We do a lot of this online.  If I could go to a computer daily I might actually catch up on all I have to do but usually I'm scrubbed in all day.  However, this month has been a bit slow so I hit the computer area and sat down to be educated on yet more info than I'll ever remember.  Yesterday I had the opportunity to learn more about people.  In our society we have male and female people.  Transgender people.  No gender people.  Gender neutral people. Nonbinary gender nonconforming people.  Cis-male people. Cis-female people. (and even people from Indiana) Then there's the pronouns for people...she/her/herself....well, you get the picture..oh wait..the gender neutral are: zhe, zhim, zher, etc.  Confused? Maybe you're not. I was and frankly still am confused.  When I got to this part in my reading I had to go back to the OR but I snapped a pic that might help you understand my plight.

Yes, it's the "Genderbread Person".   I'll look forward to the rest of this story.  I guess my thought on all of this is it doesn't matter to me how you identify yourself.  I know it matters to you and I've never met or worked with any surgical person that doesn't respect that.  But mostly we care about how best to take care of you. If you were a woman but you're now a man that's fine but did you know if you have a colonoscopy that even though you're now male, your insides are still female and you need a female colonscope? (yes, here gender does matter since male scopes are bigger...sorry guys) We don't care if you're overweight, a smoker, an alcoholic, drug addict, any race, or religion, or just a super jerk.  We always greet you with a HI and a promise that we will take good care of you and be with you the whole time of your surgery.  I've only heard the nurse, doctor, technician, use your name.  I hope that's OK.  I may need to know all this other stuff for some reason.  Not sure how I got through over 40 years in the operating room before knowing this, but this I do know:  A person by any other name is still a person...someone who needs help, someone who's probably very nervous about being in the hospital, someone who's somebody's family member or friend.  And people, that matters the most.  Amen