In the Midst of Life

you’re the Queen of bloody Sheba! Get out of the way. I want to get a tracheal tube down him.’
    I was pushed aside, and one of the young doctors tried to insert the catheter into the lungs. It is not an easy thing to do, and he had to make several attempts.
    ‘Arch the neck. It will go down easier. More than that, pull the head backwards; you’ve got to locate the trachea. It’s no good ifthe thing goes into his oesophagus. We don’t want to oxygenate his guts.’ He laughed at his own joke, and the others laughed in unison.
    ‘Have you no respect for the dead?’ I bleated, despairingly.
    ‘He’s not dead, you stupid cow. He’s coming round. This has been highly successful.’
    There was nothing I could do. I covered my face with my hands to hide my tears and fled to the office. The nurse whom I had left sitting with Dr Hyem only half an hour earlier came in.
    ‘Are you all right, Sister? You look dreadful. Can I get you a cup of tea?’
    I couldn’t look up. ‘What happened?’ I moaned. ‘How did this happen?’
    ‘I was sitting with him, like you said, Sister, and he stopped breathing, and I couldn’t feel a pulse, and I didn’t know what to do, so I rang the emergency button.’
    That was all that was needed. A young, inexperienced nurse, seeing death, possibly for the first time, and quite possibly frightened at being alone, and me, her senior, unavailable. So she had pressed the emergency button, and a resuscitation team arrived. Once started, the process could not be reversed. And, as the registrar had proudly stated, it had been highly successful.

LAZARUS
     
    The wound in Dr Hyem’s chest was sutured under local anaesthetic, the broken ribs realigned, and the chest bound, to keep them in place. We then raised him to a semi-recumbent position and changed the bed linen. Oxygen was directly entering his lungs, so his colour was good, and the cardiac machine maintained his heartbeat. Fluid was dripping into his circulation, and drugs were introduced to raise the blood pressure, to stimulate the heart muscles, and to thin the blood; antibiotics, a clot-buster and diuretics completed the cocktail.
    The registrar and his team were exhilarated by their success. They had saved a life, and that’s what medicine is all about. Lazarus had been raised from the dead. It was a miracle of modern medicine.
    The team prepared to leave, all of them exhausted. By then it was 3 a.m., but adrenalin had been pumping through their bodies and now they were worn out. The registrar apologised for his rudeness. ‘It’s the tension that gets me,’ he said. ‘I’m not aware of it. I snap at everyone, they tell me.’ He left with instructions about monitoring the cardiac, pulmonary and blood pressure responses to the machines, and the adjustments that should be made in the event of physical changes.
    Dr Hyem breathed quietly all night. His pulse and blood pressure were steady. The drip dripped, the oxygen hissed, the cardiac machine hummed quietly, and the twenty or more men who had been awake during the commotion of the night fell asleep as dawn was breaking.
    I had many other duties to attend to in the hospital, but stayed with Dr Hyem as much as possible, and, as I looked at him breathing quietly, I began to feel ashamed of myself. He was alive. Why should I have wished the old man dead? It was unworthy ofme; wicked even. He was alive due to the miracles of modern medicine. Nearly twenty years had passed since I had started nursing and everything had changed, scientific advances in drugs, surgery, in technology. I was old-fashioned, I told myself, and must embrace these changes.
    At 6 a.m. I started my morning round of the hospital. It was still dark, but the return of day could be felt in the air – sleepy sparrows began to chirp, an early morning milk delivery could be heard in the streets, the first kitchen workers were arriving. As I finished my round, light was returning, and the fears of the night, enshrined in all our fairy tales, were receding. Had the darkness played its part in exaggerating the terror I had felt for Dr Hyem, I wondered?
    By about 7 o’clock I had finished the morning round and was able to return to Dr Hyem. The registrar was there before me, checking the dials and drips, listening carefully to his patient’s heartbeat and lungs, taking a sample of blood for path lab investigations.
    ‘I owe you an apology.’ I said, ‘I doubted you.’
    ‘No, no, not at all. It can be