Email to a friend Printer friendly Font: * * * * Lemieux does two kinds of surgical procedures - vaginal and abdominal: The abdominal surgery takes longer. She uses the Oldfield CD, which is two hours long, to gauge her schedule. She starts her O.
R day, generally, with a longer case - and knows that if the CD ends before she has finished operating, she'll probably have to modify her schedule and re-schedule the final case to another day. As broad as musical tastes run is how varied the listening habits are of surgeons in the operating room. David Zukor, chief of orthopaedics at the Jewish General, includes songs by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones as well as some jazz on his iPod, but the songs he likes best are by Bob Marley and Matisyahu, an American Jewish reggae musician who blends traditional Jewish themes with reggae and rock sounds.
He also likes Buddha Bar, compilations of lounge-style chill-out music featuring jazz, Asian, Hindu and Arabic vibes. On Paul Perrotte's playlist there is everything from La Bottine Souriante to Coldplay, Cyndi Lauper to Fleetwood Mac, Billy Idol to Diana Krall. The uro-oncologist with the urology service at the Centre Hospitalier de l'UniversitГ© de MontrГ©al generally sets the iPod to shuffle play - "so we won't get three Black Sabbath songs in a row.
And if the nurses think the music is too rowdy, we can move to something less rowdy." Eclectic as his tastes are, Perrotte is disdainful of new-age music. "It's a bit boring.
"I think when music makes the mood too smooth, when things get too relaxed, that it's not alright in terms of keeping the rhythm you want to surgery. It's like listening to new-age music before a hockey game: You wouldn't." Doctors who choose to become surgeons do it because they like to operate; often, though, they get no more than one O.
R. day a week. No surgeon feels he or she ever has enough O.
R. time, said Perrotte. "So we have to make the most of what we have.
" And if music can energize a surgeon sufficiently to do one more procedure than he or she might otherwise on an operating day, that's 40 to 50 patients by year's end who are not on the waiting list, he said. For John-Paul Capolicchio, a pediatric urologist at the Montreal Children's Hospital, music in the O.R.
"lightens the mood." He used to listen, through the Internet, to an independent FM radio station in Vermont, the Point, which played an eclectic selection of jazz and soft rock, including his favourite band, Dire Straits. The hospital firewall now blocks his access to the station, and so these days he's at a loss.
He finds no pleasure in local commercial radio, he says, and so he's "kind of searching" for what to listen to next.
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