The patient was laid out, anaesthetized, under a canopy of lights in an operating theatre on the seventh floor of St. Luc Hospital in Montreal, his abdomen open, a team of seven swathed in pale blue hovering over him and around him, focused completely on him.
The surgeon, uro-oncologist Paul Perrotte, began to remove lymph nodes scarred and sticky after chemotherapy -- meticulous, painstaking work. A resident assisted him; a scrub nurse handed him instruments. Beyond them stood another small team, anaesthetist Jean-Denis Roy, a resident and an inhalation therapist, by machines monitoring the patient's blood pressure, body temperature and other vital signs.
France Guay, the running, or external, nurse, so named because she was working outside the sterile surgical field around the patient, fetched materials and equipment as Perrotte asked for them. As she worked, she hummed quietly along to Bon Jovi's It's My Life playing softly, but audibly, in the background.
Perrotte likes music in his operating room -- rock, generally: Super-tramp, Pink Floyd and Genesis, or maybe, if there are younger nurses working that day, Metallica or AC/DC. He sets up his iPod in the room, with his own external speakers, before he scrubs, and sets it to shuffle.
It's like ambient music, he says. It keeps him focused, keeps the rhythm he likes in the room, lets him tune out a conversation that the anaesthetist might be having with the inhalation therapist or running nurse: There are more people in an operating room than you might think, particularly at a university teaching hospital-- and more conversations.
Those of us who know of surgery only what we glean from television dramas think of operating rooms as austere, places where the mood is silent and urgent but for the beeping of monitors and the surgeon barking orders.
Not so much.
Increasingly, surgery has a sound-track -- from reggae to rock, Celtic to classical. And although the workings of operating rooms remain a mystery to most of us, knowing why many surgeons like music while they operate sheds some light on how they handle the seemingly awesome responsibility they have signed on for -- repairing the human body.
A generation ago, music in operating rooms was rare, in part because surgeons who ran them didn't want it and in part because it was impractical; radio reception was often poor.
Boom boxes that first played cassettes and then compact discs were an improvement, and today's mp3 players can hold thousands of songs, which means surgeons can carry their entire music library around with them. And as the sound of music becomes more prevalent in operating theatres, a body of research has shown benefits -- for patients and for their doctors.
"It relaxes the atmosphere, especially with big operations," said nurse Guay, as Foreigner's I Want to Know What Love Is came up in Perrotte's shuffle.
Surgery, clearly, has always been about the patient, but a cultural shift in the operating room has meant that what was once an almost military atmosphere has evolved to one in which surgeons today are more in tune with the psychological wellbeing of everyone else in the room as well.