1. If you’re not in uniform, we don’t want to see you go into the operating room. We don’t like strangers; they scare us We are extremely protective of our environment because sterile procedures are performed in every operating room and your presence brings new foreign germs that we don’t care about, so go back to your own apartment and let us be happy with our own familiar germs. If you feel like you’ve entered Appalachian mountain people territory when you walk into the operating room and all eyes are on you, you’re probably right!

2. Many of us sleep in our scrubs. No, they’re not the same ones we work in, but we enjoy the comfort our scrubs offer us, and we don’t really care if they’re sexy or cute, we feel right at home in them.

3. We practice sterile technique at home. When we open a 2-liter coke, we turn the lid upside down. We rub our hands together before cooking as if we were about to attend surgery. Our countertops are spotless and our dishes are nearly sterile.

4. We’ll hate you for life if you dare reach for our food while we’re eating (it’s the germ thing again). That’s why we have trouble eating out. Waitresses love to touch food, and all we can think about is all the germs she’s transferring to our food. If you want to call us phobes, then the shoe fits you. The restaurant-style buffet will blow us away. There’s no way you’re dragging an OR nurse into one of these petri dishes. People grab the same spoons over and over again, cough on the food, and there is the problem of reaching the food again. Yuck, just yuck!

5. I guess you could say we’re pretty weird with our shoes, too. We don’t want our shoes around the house, and I usually leave mine at work. If we take them home, they stay in the garage. There are so many nasty germs on shoes that we can’t see, and you have no idea what kind of horrible filth we get into during a shift. If you knew, you probably wouldn’t even want to touch us again.

6. OR nurses probably have the cleanest belly buttons in the world. Why? Well, part of our job is to clean the belly buttons before surgery. Many surgical procedures are performed laparoscopically, and the device used to inflate the abdomen is inserted through the belly button. So if the belly button isn’t clean, all those nasty germs go right into the abdomen creating a great environment for infection.

You wouldn’t believe the stuff I’ve found in patients’ belly buttons. People can shower and bathe, but they lost the memo on cleaning this area. Please, friends, wipe your navels already.

7. We speak with our eyes. This may seem a bit strange to you, but we spend most of our shift wearing a mask that covers our faces, so our eyes are the only way we can express ourselves. Most operating room nurses learn to use their eyes to convey messages to other members of the surgical team. This practice extends to our daily lives. Even when we don’t have masks on, we express our feelings and opinions with our eyes (and our eyebrows).

8. Ask us for a screwdriver or a pair of scissors and expect them to be placed in your hand in an optimal position for immediate use without readjustment. We have learned to pass the instruments that way and it carries over into everyday life.

Here’s a “weird things you never knew about surgical nurses” bonus, though this one is pretty much guessable even to a layperson. We love blood and for the life of us, we really can’t understand why anyone would swoon at the sight of it. The bloodier the case, the better. A nice sleeve of deep abs that we can stick our hands into is our idea of ​​fun.

When my blood is drawn, I watch the needle go in instead of turning my head, and I love watching the blood pour into the vial. I wonder what Freud would say about this. Maybe we were all vampires in past lives. There is no place for people who “don’t like to see blood” in the operating room. Go away and let us roll in our weirdness.

Love us or hate us, we only want the best for our patients and the quirks we have can always be explained. They say once an OR nurse, always an OR nurse, and I can certainly say that this is true. You can call us weird, but I guarantee the moment you need emergency surgery, you’ll be glad weirdo surgical nurses exist!