By Victoria Colliver

After a Virginia man accidentally recorded his doctor mocking him while he was undergoing a colonoscopy, many patients wondered if the same thing could have happened to them while under sedation.

Hopefully such incidences are rare, but an anonymous essay breaks the silence on bad behavior — really bad behavior — in the operating room.

In the essay, a physician teaching medical students asked them if they had done or witnessed anything in their medical experience that they need to be forgiven for or requires them to forgive someone else, or perhaps, is unforgivable.

An uncomfortable silence followed.

Finally, one student opened up, telling a disturbingly misogynistic tale. He was in the operating room when a surgeon suggested an anesthetized hysterectomy patient was “enjoying” the preparation for the procedure. The student admitted feeling pressured to laugh along.

Then the essay’s author went on to tell his own harrowing tale, one that happened in his third year of medical school.

After the mother of a baby he’d just delivered started bleeding out, an obstetrician stepped in. The doctor saved the woman’s life, but afterward his behavior was abhorrent; he sang “La Cucaracha” (she was Latina), danced and stomped his feet while his hand was still in her vagina. Just as the author started to join in, the anesthesiologist told them to knock it off.

The medical journal’s editors said they had only published an anonymous essay one other time, and they strongly debated whether to publish this one. But they thought exposing racist, sexist and disrespectful conduct by medical professionals could help encourage others to speak up against such unseemly behavior.

“By shining a light on the dark side of the profession, we emphasize to physicians young and old that this behavior is unacceptable — we should not only refrain from personally acting in such a manner but also call out our colleagues who do,” the journal’s editors wrote in an editorial that accompanied the essay.

As for the Virginia man whose surgical team made fun of him — they joked about a rash on his genitals being a sexually transmitted disease, among other insults — the patient had the last laugh. A jury awarded him $500,000 in June after he sued the two doctors and their medical practices for defamation and malpractice.