How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter by Sherwin B. Nuland

Author:Sherwin B. Nuland [Nuland, Sherwin B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science
ISBN: 9781439505182
Publisher: Paw Prints
Published: 2008-06-26T10:00:00+00:00

In that long-ago day when laboratory science was barely beginning its long partnership with bedside medicine, Livingstone’s explanation for his remarkable calm was one with which most people probably agreed. It would have taken prescience, or perhaps a disavowal of faith, to have invoked physiology in those dawning moments when microscopy and chemical analysis were but swaddled newborns. For Livingstone to have somehow intuited the principles of stress-related biochemical alteration of states of consciousness was quite improbable. Absent a supreme leap of prophetic vision, beyond the capability of even an ordained Christian missionary, he could not have foreseen the discovery of such a phenomenon.

I have had the personal experience of one such episode. I am not by nature a fearful person, and yet there are two situations that scare me to the point of pathological irrationality: finding myself looking down from some great height, and being immersed in deep water. I need only to think about either of those two hazards to set off a spasm of tightness in each of my sphincters, from the top of the alimentary tube right down to its very end. It is not just that I am cautious about deep water, or even afraid of it—I am unmanned by it, reduced to craven, phobic cowardice. In a swimming pool surrounded by healthy young adults, any one of whom is capable of rescuing me without so much as straining a single fiber of Schwarzeneggeroid muscle, I have more than once felt the dread certainty of imminent drowning; it has been exploded into my brain by the simple realization that I have wandered a few inches beyond my depth.

With an American colleague and a half dozen faculty members of the Hunan Medical University near the south-central Chinese city of Changsha, I was leaving the site of an elaborate banquet (during which my entire alcoholic intake had consisted of one bottle of Tsingtao beer consumed during the early portion of a two-hour meal), chatting and strolling along a curving walkway that stretched a short distance through what appeared to be a shallow reflecting pool. I was fully dressed, and carried a partially filled carry-on bag slung over one shoulder. Having been at the guest-house two years earlier, I was not unfamiliar with the terrain, but I seem not to have taken into account the narrowness of the winding pavement or the virtual absence of outside lighting on that starless night. As I turned partly around in midstride to address a remark to one of my hosts walking behind me, I suddenly found myself with nothing under my right foot. In an instant, I was immersed well over my head in the impenetrably black water, and still sinking. Simultaneously with the flash of realization that I was fully vertical and continuing to go ever deeper, I felt a stunned surprise and a mild but very distant sense of ironic amusement, as though I were involved in some ill-advised and silly stunt that hadn’t worked out quite as I had planned.

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