Prof Farah Bhatti, 57
When you walk into an operating theatre, it’s almost like a sacred space. It demands all my focus. Precision. Still hands. Calm thoughts. Complete presence in the moment.
Typically, I’ll do two operations in a day, each up to five hours long, and separated by a break of up to an hour. For the most part I’m standing, in one position, focused exclusively on an area of the heart that’s perhaps only a couple of millimetres wide, using sutures you almost can’t see with the naked eye, and often wearing magnifying glasses.
I follow a set routine on operating days: I mentally rehearse and visualise every part of the procedure. And I eat a good breakfast: Ready Brek in winter and Alpen in summer, plus two coffees in the morning – one in bed, and one in my office with my breakfast. No more, no less, so that I balance my hydration and won’t need to use the bathroom in theatre. I have a bottle of water just outside, to drink as soon as I break scrub.
Often, I won’t even raise my eyes from the tiny area of the heart I’m working on. The scrub nurse will hand me instruments and our movements happen in sync, without pause. During the most intricate parts, the theatre is silent. I don’t have music playing, though some of my colleagues do. I listen – for subtle sounds in the heart lung machine, for example, that can alert you early that something isn’t quite right.
I’m very in touch with my patients, their histories, their families. But in theatre, you have to detach yourself from all that. At the start of my career, it was a conscious act: saying to myself. “I’m not thinking about anything else.” Over the years, that hardens into habit. Because heart surgery really is life and death. A patient’s life is in your hands. We stop their heart to work on it, and hold it in our hands. That concentrates the mind.
Prof Bhatti works at Swansea University Medical School
From this article:
‘Standing still is an art’: how to focus, by those who know – from heart surgeons to living statues
When you walk into an operating theatre, it’s almost like a sacred space. It demands all my focus. Precision. Still hands. Calm thoughts. Complete presence in the moment.
Typically, I’ll do two operations in a day, each up to five hours long, and separated by a break of up to an hour. For the most part I’m standing, in one position, focused exclusively on an area of the heart that’s perhaps only a couple of millimetres wide, using sutures you almost can’t see with the naked eye, and often wearing magnifying glasses.
I follow a set routine on operating days: I mentally rehearse and visualise every part of the procedure. And I eat a good breakfast: Ready Brek in winter and Alpen in summer, plus two coffees in the morning – one in bed, and one in my office with my breakfast. No more, no less, so that I balance my hydration and won’t need to use the bathroom in theatre. I have a bottle of water just outside, to drink as soon as I break scrub.
Often, I won’t even raise my eyes from the tiny area of the heart I’m working on. The scrub nurse will hand me instruments and our movements happen in sync, without pause. During the most intricate parts, the theatre is silent. I don’t have music playing, though some of my colleagues do. I listen – for subtle sounds in the heart lung machine, for example, that can alert you early that something isn’t quite right.
I’m very in touch with my patients, their histories, their families. But in theatre, you have to detach yourself from all that. At the start of my career, it was a conscious act: saying to myself. “I’m not thinking about anything else.” Over the years, that hardens into habit. Because heart surgery really is life and death. A patient’s life is in your hands. We stop their heart to work on it, and hold it in our hands. That concentrates the mind.
Prof Bhatti works at Swansea University Medical School
From this article:
‘Standing still is an art’: how to focus, by those who know – from heart surgeons to living statues
