As I watched the styl­ish retro movie €Down with Love€ star­ring Renee Zell­weger and Ewan McGre­gor, I briefly longed to return to the past. Briefly.

Back to rigid scopes? Teach­ing heads? The nurse not being able to see dur­ing most of the endo­scopies and all of the ERCPs?

There was an upside to the past, though.

I ran into SGNA past pres­i­dent Nancy Schloss­berg doing her thing at the Olym­pus booth at this fall's ACG in Bal­ti­more. Sur­rounded by the height of tech­nol­ogy man­i­fest in the Medusean tan­gle of scopes, we dis­cussed endonurs­ing of the past.

€ I have an old endoscopy nurs­ing guide­line from the 80's that advo­cates not clean­ing the endo­scope between cases,€ laughs Nancy Schloss­berg RN CGRN, Man­ager Cur­ricu­lum Devel­op­ment, Olym­pus Amer­ica Inc. Instruc­tions from The Gas­troen­terol­ogy Assis­tant: A Lab­o­ra­tory Man­ual, 2nd Edi­tion, 1981 state €Dis­in­fec­tion of endo­scopic equip­ment is desir­able, but must be prac­ti­cal in a clin­i­cal set­ting. The long method of dis­in­fec­tion is more time-consuming and may not be applic­a­ble between cases in a very busy unit.€

€Of course, that's only if the endoscopy nurse was really busy. It would be an unac­cept­able stan­dard of care today, despite the huge num­bers of pro­ce­dures done by the aver­age endo­suite€ adds Ms. Schlossberg.

No, I'd say not. But it did save time.

My father advised me, when still in train­ing, to open a €fast food' prac­tice of gas­troen­terol­ogy. Only partly jok­ing, he designed my new prac­tice. €You could lease an old fast food joint with a drive-through win­dow,€ he enthused. €Your part­ners could be a urol­o­gist, gyne­col­o­gist, den­tist and ENT. The patients wouldn't even have to get out of their cars. They could sim­ply roll up to the drive-through win­dow, extend the appro­pri­ate ori­fice out of the win­dow of the vehi­cle, have it plumbed, then drive them­selves on to the man­aged care check-out window.€

My pop's name for my practice?

€Orifices-R-Us€.

It makes me shud­der to think of the combo selec­tions. And let's not even dis­cuss the whopper.