Dartmouth Medicine Magazine

Anesthesiologist & Artist

The photographs of Alfred Feingold, M.D.

ON AUTOPILOT: Tabitha Washington, M.D., a resident in anesthesiology, is monitoring a patient who has been given a regional anesthetic to prepare for the removal of a golf-ball-sized aneurysm in his popliteal artery, in the lower leg.

This patient is stable and the anesthesiologist is now in that quiet period when all she has to do is be aware if something untoward happens. She's listening to the monitors. It's like being the pilot of an airplane at 40,000 feet midway between Boston and San Francisco. There's another picture where you can see that the patient doesn't have any devices around his face, so that means he's awake and she's injected a medicine to make the operative area numb.

A SPACE OF HER OWN: OR nurse Tanya Fraser, R.N., B.S.N., is doing some pre- or postop paperwork here. All Feingold did to this picture was to blur the background.

I liked the fact she was in such a strange position— perched up there. It's not the way you would think of an operating-room nurse. She had raised the chair up high and found a place for her feet so she could work comfortably at that table. Operating rooms are shared spaces—there are very few things you can call your own. She doesn't have her own desk and her own chair. This was the table she had, so she raised the chair up to make it functional.

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