Outpatient Surgery Magazine

Personal Battle - March 2021 - Outpatient Surgery Magazine

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working in Jamaica in the early 1980s until she arrived in the U.S. in 1985. She reentered the OR in the early 1990s and continued working in surgery for the next two decades. All along, she had a vague notion of the harmfulness of surgical smoke, but the issue had never been a priority. It still wasn't when Ms. Hohn began the fight for her life at the start of the pandemic. All she wanted to do was get better. "That was a difficult time," she says. "I was immunocompromised, and family members were a threat to my well-being, so they stayed away. I was alone and petrified." One night before bed, she said a brief prayer and laid down ready to die. "I had given up," she recalls. "I didn't have the will to go on." When she awoke the next morning, she decided God had other plans for her. In constant pain and suffering shortness of breath, she started chemotherapy, immunotherapy and other treatments. During this time of great personal suffering, Ms. Hohn found the strength to embark on a quest to under- stand how surgical smoke may have affected her health, and how she could protect other surgical professionals from suffering a similar fate. Smoke evacuators were installed in every OR at the Atlanta VA a couple of years ago. "But every time we'd attempt to hook one up, the surgeon would say it was too cumbersome, and it would slow them down," says Ms. Hohn. "When something is rejected time and again, you offer it less." Worse, she and other con- cerned colleagues had no organi- zational support. "Smoke evacua- tion wasn't mandatory, so it wasn't enforced," she says. Ms. Hohn was convinced there was truth in the idea that breath- ing in surgical smoke day after day over a long career had caused her lung cancer, but didn't know how to act on the hunch. She soon received emails about surgical smoke safety from AORN and the International Council on Surgical Plume (ICSP). She got more involved and energized, and con- sidered how she could contribute to the smoke evacuation movement. "I didn't have a clue about where to begin," she says, "but knew I wanted to make a difference." Before her illness, Ms. Hohn was so busy that she rarely had time to attend local AORN branch meetings. However, she'd become aware of fellow member Brenda Ulmer, MN, RN, CNOR, past presi- dent of AORN, who had been investigating and advocating for smoke safety since the mid-1990s. She reached out to Ms. Ulmer, who lived close by in suburban Atlanta. It was the connection Ms. Hohn needed to advance her newfound advocacy. For Ms. Ulmer, Ms. Hohn was another reminder of the importance of her efforts to remove surgical smoke from ORs. She graduated from nursing school in 1975 and had worked various positions in ORs around Atlanta since. While serving on AORN's board of directors in the mid-1990s, she became interested in surgical smoke, chairing roundtable dis- cussions on the topic. Since then, she's written arti- cles, book chapters and self-study guides on surgical smoke safety. She was part of the group that devel- oped AORN's first smoke toolkit, as well as its smoke position statement, which morphed into guidelines in 2017. "I don't know how many M A R C H 2 0 2 1 • O U T P A T I E N T S U R G E R Y . N E T • 2 1 HEALTH HAZARD The Georgia Smoke Busters printed cards and T-shirts with this attention-grabbing logo.

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