The Doctor Will See You Now by Amir Khan

Author:Amir Khan [Khan, Dr Amir]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473581623
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

Chapter Ten

People die.

You learn that fairly early on at medical school. They keep telling you to never get attached to patients or create a dependency or become too emotionally involved. It’s Medicine 101. But humans are social animals, we live in social groups and we have complex social relationships. Sometimes it is impossible to turn off your emotions.

Nothing is more complex than the doctor–patient relationship. It’s steeped in professionalism, confidentiality and all sorts of rules and regulations, but at the same time we encourage empathy, rapport and building a connection with a patient. It’s a juxtaposition that nobody really talks about. You just have to find your own way.

I remember when I was a medical student in hospital carrying an arrest bleep. These are only given out every so often and it was the most exciting thing. For a start, they clip onto your belt and they are bright red so everybody can see you are part of the ‘arrest team’. The arrest bleeps go off whenever somebody is having a cardiac arrest in the hospital, and they signify that you are now officially part of a select team that has been chosen to bring them back to life. The normal bleeps are black and a bit dowdy-looking, and have a boring, slightly irritating bleeping noise (hence the name). When the normal black bleep goes off, people just look a bit annoyed and go to the nearest phone to call the ward, only to be told there’s some mundane job that has been assigned to them. When the cardiac arrest bleep goes off it sounds more like a siren. You have to drop whatever you are doing and run to the ward immediately.

I remember running through corridors packed with relatives visiting patients, one arm holding the stethoscope that I was proudly wearing around my neck and the other propelling me forward. It was very dramatic. I knew that, as a student, I would play a very small role in the attempts to resuscitate the patient but I liked the looks I got as I ran past people while the siren was going off. I imagine this is what Pamela Anderson felt like during her slow-motion running days on Baywatch. I felt very important.

I wasn’t.

Invariably when I got there, it was a patient who I didn’t know and was often old and frail-looking. There was a team of experienced people carrying out CPR. I would occasionally get the opportunity to do the chest compressions, but that was about the extent of a medical student’s involvement. When they died, it was sad. But only because death is always sad, and because in the back of my mind I knew there would be some devastated relatives somewhere. But I felt detached.

It’s different when you are a GP. You have looked after these people for years, you know them. You know not only about their ailments, but also about their hobbies, who their husband is, how many children they have, the fact they went

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