Episode 23

Although this trip has given me many eye-opening experiences, there is one that seems to deserve its own entry. After a week at City Heart Center, we saw numerous very sick people. The miserable, frail, and dieing congregated to its beds, and although we had witnessed many deaths, I had yet to see someone make that melancholic transition from the living to the deceased.

She was fairly old and suffering from heart failure. The first day we saw her in rounds, they were attempting to put her on a ventilator, as she could no longer breathe on her own. The very next morning we came into the ward to find out her heart rate had plummeted and the only thing keeping her alive were the chemicals maintaining what was left of her heart rate. Suddenly the line that was sporadically dashing up and down the monitor went flat. The attending spent the next 20 minutes trying to resuscitate the elderly woman, and although a few heartbeats would occasionally appear, all in all it was to no avail. The motions were violent and unnerving, and I couldn’t really fathom what was going on in front of me. The difference between life and death appeared to be this arbitrary declaration, as there was no telling from her limp and pale body what was alive and what was not. I guess death isn’t always a definite moment, there is no red flag telling you that the soul has left its fleeting abode, there isn’t always some dramatic production signifying it’s the end. As I watched, terrified behind my clipboard I saw that life can sometimes just slip through the cracks, quietly and unnoticed, and although I knew very little about this woman, her life and subsequent end seemed to shake me to the core. I stepped back into the corner as the family came to say goodbye to a loved one who had already gone. “Mamaji!” the daughter cried as she opened her mother’s eyelids to inspect the hollow body for any signs of inhabitance. The look on the daughter’s face signified that she found nothing, that in those 20 or so minutes the immeasurable breath of life had sighed, and left in its place a stiff and empty shell. I wanted to weep with them, not only for the family and their loss, and for the woman whose life had just ended, but also for the precarious line that we tread between the animate spirit of being and the lifelessness of the remains before me. Although I know there will probably be many more days and stories like this one if I am to have a future in the medical profession, hers will resonate with me for a lifetime.