No direction has yet been offered, so after breakfast I took
my camera down to the lobby with the intention of shooting whatever presented
itself. Partly the exercise was to have
others get used to me carrying a camera.
It turned out to be a good a day to make my move. Sunday is the busiest day at the hospital and
while there weren't throngs, there was a steady stream of patients.
Surgery was scheduled for the afternoon and I was able to
secure permission to shoot. Altogether I
was in the operating theater for about 75 minutes for two cataract surgeries
and took about 350 images. This turned
out to be excessive. Many images were
small variations on the same composition.
Perhaps I was anxious about missing opportunities and compensated by
snapping repeatedly without thinking much about how one shot differed from the next.
I didn't have much foreknowledge of how the operations would
be staged, only that they were routine and wouldn't take long. In other words, there was no preplanning and
no consideration of exactly what kind of shots I might take. It was all done on the fly. Unfortunately, as a result, I missed the
anesthetizing procedure, which occurred in a separate room before the patient
was brought into the operating theatre.
I felt somewhat more comfortable in the environment than
during my observations in Dubai, my first experience in an operating room as
something other than a patient. It
helped that I had spent my first couple of days at the hospital getting to know
the nursing staff, knew them by name, and could chat with and ask questions of
them while they prepped the theatre.
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