Come on to carry me home

I had just spoken to her ten minutes before the code blue was called. She was laughing and smiling then. I was telling her how she reminded me of a famous person. In retrospect, I think she was smiling at death. And at me and all the doctors, students and nurses fussing around her. What's all the fuss, she must have wondered. Death is here and I'm ready to go. Time to kick the bucket.

The next thing I knew, she was unresponsive. We were all silent as she slipped away. Then came the task of calling the time of death. I looked at her face. Her jaw was hanging open, her lips blue and the life snuffed out of her. And just like that she was no longer a person. She was a body. How very still.

Pupils not reactive to light. Not responsive to sternal rub. No heart sounds. No breath sounds. No bowel sounds.

And as the son broke down and cried, I thought about how life is so short. It really is.

And that if I knew I had only so much time left, I know exactly what I would do. And I wonder, why I am waiting.

It was only the next day before another patient came in. And it all sounded too familiar. The nurses had come up to me and said, "Mun this is not your patient, but this man is not quite responsive. He's GCS 3." Immediately I left my work and went to see the patient, my heart nearly jumping out of my chest. Please let the nurses be wrong. As I rubbed his sternum, he opened his eyes and grunted at me. I continued to call out his name and he finally responded. He said he was allright and looked at me as if saying let me get back to sleep already.

I could hear the sounds of relief from the nurses behind me. I listened to his heart and there it was - the very tight sounds of aortic stenosis. The man was in end-stage heart failure. He was fluctuating in and out of consciousness. His family watched me. There was no need to call a code blue. The man was dying and it wasn't my experience that told me this. I am inexperienced but I had an overwhelming sense of de-ja-vu. He had the look of a dying man. Having just seen the same look on another patient the day before.

Very calmly, I tracked down the medical registar. I said to him this man is dying. And the family wanted him to be resuscitated. I think it's time to break the bad news.

The family took the news in stride. And soon everyone arrived. The next day he passed away peacefully.

As I was walking back to my accomodation, I suddenly realised I was humming. A folk song I used to sing with the severely demented residents of a nursing home during my community placement.

It was the song "Swing low, sweet chariot."

Which makes me think, I may be quite in-tuned to death.