Nothing could have prepared me for the hell that was Field Surgery.
I made a lot of mistakes, some of them very costly, but the worst one was thinking that my first Field Surgery would end well. It was absolute hell, no triage was being done, half a dozen marines screaming that they were injured, I didn't bring space cleaner to clean my hands (I didn't even know you could clean your hands/gloves with that, but now I know), I had to learn new techniques for finding out what injuries someone had, without a body scanner... it was first time being a Doctor all over again.
The first thing that got me was the failure rate of tables. We had no surgical table, someone made a regular table on the fly. During surgery I often worsened wounds, sometimes damaging organs and then having to extend surgery time to fix my mistakes (remember, I had no peridaxon). I was absolutely not prepared to handle that at the time, but that was only my first mistake.
The second big mistake was setting up in an open area. It made it almost impossible to triage and keep things orderly, I was surrounded by half a dozen or more marines that had injuries, and I had a hard time figuring out which ones to prioritize with all the logs flying by. If I could have made it in to a Nexus building... or even stayed in a corner of the Rasp... I could have limited the times I was pushed aside during surgery, and made things a lot easier on myself.
The mistake I think I regret the most, but definitely not my last mistake of that round, was not immediately treating the doctor I had. I got so panicked by what was going on, that I didn't even treat him first. He could have really helped my workload and we would have stood a better chance in that botched round than just me trying to handle it alone. He ended up getting killed by the xenos after crit hell for nearly 15 minutes, definitely one of my most regretful mistakes.
I made a lot of mistakes, including confusing Soporific for Spaceacillin in the chaos (it's hilarious looking back on it, but I felt like a real idiot during the time when I found out), which I was injecting people with thinking it would handle any infections from my dirty hands... but that's why they couldn't get back up. People weren't happy with how things went, think even one guy said in OOC after the round "JOBBAN SURGEON"... but I needed the experience. I still need that experience, just like I needed it when I started this doctor role. More importantly, I need help and tips from others to make sure I don't have this bad of an experience in the future. I guess I want to share some of what I learned from my pretty bad experience, in hopes that you guys will also share tips, or maybe even correct some of mine to be far better than what they were. This specifically pertains to Field Surgery, and could be anything from being deployed down to planetside Medbay, to emergency evacuation, as long as the tips take the circumstance in to account.
Some of the small bits I have learned in this experience, more oriented towards doctors who may have their first field surgery ever like I did:
- Find an in-door area of some sort for any field surgery. Never do it outside, it brings chaos on yourself, and puts the lives of those you operate on in danger in case of an emergency landing against xenos.
- If you have time before going planetside for field surgery for any reason, don't just gather all your surgery tools, anesthetic equipment and an IV drip with a couple bloodbags. Get some extra stuff, like Peridaxon (or peridex), Bicardine (you'll need it if you end up doing table surgery), more quick-clot and Dex plus... I can't really give a full Field Surgeon loadout, you just have to think of what you'll need the MOST on the ground (apart from evac).
- Do your best to minimize your workload as much as possible in all cases! Unless priority health conditions arise like embryo, lungs, and such.... take care of doctors and field medics first! The medics can triage and stabilize people who are waiting, and the doctor could stabilize the guy you're working on as you screw up table surgery... or even half your workload and do surgery in another spot at the same time!
- Don't mistake Soporific for Spaceacillin. Words cannot describe how dumb I feel.
- If a xeno busts in your area of operating, and you have someone open, with fractures, or any injury at all, you DRAG them (if you don't have a rollerbed). Yes, I'm serious, if the xeno is THAT close, you DRAG YOUR PATIENT AWAY. You don't have time to move at slow grab rate, yes it will probably make the wounds way worse, but an encounter with a xeno is guaranteed death of your patient if he's under. He can either die of his wounds worsening, or get captured by a xeno and infected/killed.
- For the love of God... don't panic! The amount of mistakes you made can increase tenfold, twofold at the minimum, when you are panicking. Fix your current patient before moving on to the next one, unless they are suffering continuous damage from a busted organ, have a xeno inside them, or something very very serious. Panic won't do you any good, things only get worse if you do half the job just to be in a hurry to get the next one in surgery.
I showed you mine, you show me yours. I'm no expert, I catch on quick as I do, but I make mistakes and there are plenty of tricks I don't know. The more we know, the better chance of marines surviving field surgery. I'm not the best doctor, to many who have played for months -- even years, I might be considered barely competent. However, I like the Doctor role, and I like surgery... I'm not giving up, but your tips would really help me so I don't make rounds for others miserable if field surgery is a thing in them.
Post-Script: This is completely unrelated, but I remember a surgery I had that made me laugh. I opened up a russian girl's skull one round because supposedly it was broken... and there were not just bone chips in there, but a WHOLE BOTTLE. So many opportunities for a Russian joke... I got it out, fixed her up and that was it. Still makes me smirk to this day.
