The gown card reads “put a sock in it!”.

Yeah, that’s an idiom. It means be quiet!

That is not the context of this post.

This post is about socks and how important they are to the OR patient.

The operating room is cold.

Well, not really; the patients are cold. It is cold to the patient who is in a gown and stripped of their underwear and their own clothes. The patients are wearing thin cotton sheaths. They are cold. We give them socks to wear and hats. These socks serve two purposes, they are non-slip and they serve to keep their feet covered.

Socks are non-slip because we don’t want patients to fall. Because the ground is hard and they might get hurt. The floor is also often gross because of the shoes that all of the healthcare workers wear. Just think of all the things that people walk through before walking on the floor of the patient room. Especially the operating room floors.

I know I have written about how I cringe every time I see a child on the floor and being picked up, without washing the child’s hands.

The socks help with both of these problems.

Okay, it’s a little bit be quiet. But I won’t tell a patient to be quiet. I will tell a surgeon to be quiet in the right context. But that is another story.