The Patient Read Online Free PDF Page B

drastically to Jonathan’s sense of embarrassment.
    After putting on a new pair of rubber gloves, she put a tourniquet on his arm, tapped the skin a few times and decided on the vein from which she would harvest the blood. Seconds later, she had several full vials and was removing the needle from his arm. The curtain was pulled open abruptly. It was the nurse he had seen arguing with the doctor in front of the TV.
    â€˜Corina, cardiac arrest in cubicle four,’ she shouted.
    â€˜Please label these tubes for me, Vanessa.’ And with that she pushed aside the curtain and left.
    Through the open curtains, Jonathan saw sights he had never seen in his entire life. The red beauty who was just at his side was now barking orders to staff at the cubicle directly opposite his. ‘Intracardiac adrenaline. Come on, hurry up. Keep that cardiac massage going!’
    There was a woman who looked to be at least in her 90s. Jonathan could see that she had soiled herself. There was an awful stench spreading throughout the Emergency department. More sickening was the sound of her rib bones breaking from the cardiac massage. The grating, horrible sound made Jonathan gag.
    A nurse handed the doctor a syringe, and she called outto the burly intern to stop massage, then plunged the needle into the front of the old woman’s chest.
    â€˜Anything?’ shouted the doctor.
    Silence. Then, the beeping that Jonathan had seen on a multitude of TV shows. The heart stirring to beat once again.
    â€˜Yesss!’ The doctor looked immensely satisfied. ‘Keep her on the infusion and get her up to Coronary Care pronto,’ she called out to no one in particular yet to everyone in the cubicle.
    Everyone was suddenly aware of a very old man standing at the doctors’ desk in the centre of Emergency.
    â€˜Today was our sixtieth wedding anniversary. Is she going to be OK?’ He was distraught but understood that his wife had been given a reprieve. The Greek doctor had worked a Lazarus miracle.
    â€˜Would you like to see your wife, sir?’ The intern, Charlie, was doing his best, but he had little experience himself of grief. During their intern year, medical students were transformed by their sudden confrontation with human suffering. It did one of two things to them: either filled them with intense compassion – the minority – or it hardened them so that they stood aloof to pain. Charlie was on the way to becoming one of the latter, who formed the majority of the health profession. The rhetoric was that you needed to be objective if you were to deal with the loss, grief, unfairness, sadness and pain that illness dished out daily, without fear or favour. The Emergency department was the feeder tube into the hospital and hence was a place of concentrated despair. He knew that, while the man’s wife was alive now, hercardiac arrest meant that she would probably be dead within a year.

    An orderly came to see Jonathan. ‘I’m here to take you up to the X-ray department. You’re having an ultrasound of your kidney and bladder. Lie down, and I’ll wheel you.’
    â€˜Thanks.’ Jonathan did as he was told, and the orderly elevated the sides of the bed and wheeled him out of Emergency down a long corridor to the lift, which took him up to the X-ray department. There, he was parked in a corner for an hour. Finally, a young adolescent – or so she seemed to Jonathan – came by and wheeled him into the ultrasound room.
    â€˜Can you take your gown off, please? And your underpants?’ said the young woman. Jonathan appreciated the unambiguous instructions, which left no room for conjecture. ‘We need to do an ultrasound of your bladder. When was the last time you passed urine?’
    It had been a few hours, which she said was good as it would make the pictures of his bladder more distinct. She spread copious amounts of sticky jelly over his flanks and his lower abdomen; the jelly