The short version is we’re the surgeon’s bitch. Before a surgery, we pull all the instrument sets and sterile supplies needed for a case; open those items to create a sterile field, and organize that field so that it can easily facilitate the actual case. Just before the case, we’ll help position and sometimes (this is usually nurse territory) prep the surgical site on the patient.

During the case, passing instruments to and from the backtable/mayo stand is our bread and butter… if you’ve seen TV shows about the OR they always have this scene where the surgeon says “scalpel” and holds his hands out expectantly. The hand the comes out of the corner of the screen with a scalpel is me. …except if they actually have to vocalize “scalpel” you’ve already fucked up - more realistically they’d jump on the opportunity to say something snarky like “You awake over there, bro?” …generally we need to know surgeries well enough to anticipate the expected steps. Do your job well and the surgeon doesn’t have to ever actually ask for anything cuz it’s already in their hand. We also handle specimens and assist with certain surgical actions like retracting tissue, clipping bleeders, suturing (sometimes… most surgeons like to do the suturing themselves). The whole time we’re monitoring for breaks in sterility… like a case I did today, I noticed the surgeon had a tiny hole in his glove, so I called him out - didn’t break skin, so the surgeon was fine, but at some point in the case, something got contaminated, but we don’t know what, so that patient got extra antibiotics and will be more closely monitored for infection.

After the case, we again help move the patient, then tear it all down, set the instruments up to go down to sterile processing, clean the room up, and open for the next one.

This video (fair warning: gore) does a decent job showcasing it (most surgical tech content on youtube is not great).

Elbow deep in some stranger’s abdomen is ‘just another Tuesday’.

It’s a cool job - I’m especially lucky to have it, cuz when I enlisted I was was just randomly assigned to the military’s version of it… could have just as well been put into any other job in the military. I’m a civilian now, and using my GI bill to go to nursing school - crossing over to the dark side soon! Hoping to stay in the OR though, just as a nurse instead of a tech.

Pay is okay… I’ve been at it for a decade, and am up to $24/hr. Nurses make a lot more than we do, so I generally don’t advise people bother with paying for a civilian surgical tech school when they could get an associates in nursing instead - similar prereqs, not that much more of a time commitment to graduation, but way higher earning potential.

Also it hurts. My back, hips, knees, and ankles are pretty well fucked. We almost never sit except on our lunch break, and standing in the same position (or contorted pulling some dude’s liver away from the surgeon for hours) causes lots of degradation over time, so it’s kind of a shitty job to shoot for as a long term option. Hitting that decade mark is more a result of me procrastinating than anything else - idk why any scrub tech sticks with it long enough to retire from it, but people do.

I’m wrapping up my med lab program myself.

If you end up working in a hospital lab, the OR would probably let you sit in for a few cases if you ask. Especially for shit like thyroid cases where we send a shitload of frozens to lab just so you can see our end of bringing that chaos to you.

I’ve got a background in histo and might end up doing quick TAT H&E slides mid-surgery

You’re probably already familiar with Mohs procedures, but if not, you sound like you’d be golden for that. They slice the specimen along the entire diameter and screen the full surface of the wound for cancer - as opposed to just checking margins. …then again, that might be the kind of thing you’re leaving if you’ve got a history in histo… I have no idea what the breakdown is of who does what in the lab setting.