Fragile Lives by Stephen Westaby

Author:Stephen Westaby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2016-12-10T16:00:00+00:00

10

life on a battery

We will now discuss in a little more detail the struggle for existence.

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species

It was a warm summer’s morning in the first week of June at the turn of the millennium. At 11 am there was a tentative, almost apologetic knock on my office door. And there stood Peter, his large frame filling the doorway. He leaned on a stick, swaying unsteadily, and he was sweating profusely, his head bowed, his lips and nose blue, panting for breath. Out of pride he refused to be pushed through the door in his wheelchair. Only weeks before he’d received the last rites, but such details still mattered to this man. Desperately trying to disguise his distress he slowly lifted his head and stared straight ahead through the doorway. He couldn’t see me yet but – like Stefan – he reminded me of a concentration camp victim, a dead man walking, all hope abandoned.

My secretary Dee was visibly shaken by Peter’s distress, so I broke the silence.

‘You must be Peter. Please come in and sit down.’

Hidden behind the stooped frame was Peter’s foster son, who parked the wheelchair in the corridor. I tried to make them comfortable with a little joke.

‘Did you pay for that parking space? This is the NHS, you know!’

They didn’t get it.

Peter shuffled slowly through to my room, and began staring at my certificates, awards and other surgical paraphernalia on the walls. He was checking me out. A religious man, he worked as a counsellor for the terminally ill with AIDS. But life had come full circle and he faced death. His existence had become that of an intelligent mind attached to a body rendered useless by heart failure. He was expecting the end to come soon, the sooner the better. I gestured to the armchair. He set the stick aside and sat down with a grunt.

Now I was checking him out. He was breathless on the slightest exertion, his belly bulged with an engorged liver and fluid, and I could see that his legs were swollen and purple. He wore oversized sandals, with socks stretched over massively swollen feet, and there were stained dressings on leg ulcers that the socks failed to cover. I didn’t need to examine him. This was gross end-stage heart failure. I was amazed that he’d made the effort to leave home as he could die at any moment.

Some months before Peter’s visit a colleague and I had written an open letter to members of the British Cardiac Society (as it was then) to announce that we were ready to test a revolutionary new type of artificial heart – the Jarvik 2000. We needed to recruit terminally ill heart-failure patients who were not eligible for cardiac transplantation. Peter fitted the bill perfectly.

I’d already read his medical notes from the cardiologist. Peter had first been diagnosed in March 2005 with dilated cardiomyopathy that had been triggered by a viral illness affecting his heart muscle. He’d had a bout of influenza, which turned to myocarditis, but initially recovered.

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