Lord of the Rings

We have nurses and theater assistants. Both of them assist during operations in the operation theater. That day I had washed up for an operation, and was in the process of wearing surgical gloves. Along came the theater assistant, washed up and wearing a sterile gown. When he started donning surgical gloves, I noticed he had three rings on his fingers, two on left hand and one on the right. I stopped him and asked him if he always washed up with the rings on his fingers. I appeared he did. One of them was of copper, probably worn for good health. The other Two either had ornamental value (gold and precious stone), marital value (wedding wing) or religious / magical value (charm for good luck). I got one of the medical students to take a photograph of his hands on his cell phone. The assistant kept on hiding his hands, but I somehow managed to get the student to snap a picture showing the rings clearly. I did not plan to show the picture to anyone. I just wanted to scare him so that he would not repeat this mistake. Then I explained that he had to wear no rings while washing up, because microbes would remain between the rings and the fingers and in the rings too. I sent him away to remove the rings and wash up again. He did so. On my next operation day, he washed up with me, and he did not have any rings on his fingers. I was happy. But my happiness was short lived. The chief nurse of the theater washed up for the next operation. Not only did she have a ring on one of her fingers, but also a religious thread around the wrist. She said the ring was too tight and would not come off. She did not say anything about the thread. I asked her not to assist for an operation if she could not get the stuff off. Today she did not have the stuff on when she washed up. So I was curing one person per week. It was not as if these people did not know they should not wear things from el bows down while washing up. I think it is a combination of laziness, fear of losing valuables like rings if removed during the assisting job, fear of not wearing religious threads at all times, and fear of failure without the lucky charms on their person. I mentioned this to one of my junior colleagues who worked in my unit before getting promoted to head a unit herself. She said, “Sir, it is not only with these people. A professor of surgery had come to our operation theater once to manage a surgical problem in one of our patients. He washed up with a band-aid on his finger. Now he heads a superspecialty department.” I was stumped. If such highly qualified people who definitely knew the principles of surgical asepsis and antisepsis very well behaved in this manner, it would be but natural that their juniors would behave similarly too.