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“Dandy. Absolutely fucking dandy.” Her hands remained steady and the compressions perfectly timed even as her breathing became laboured from the exertion.
Raj took over the bag again, his gaze permanently split between the patient and the monitor.
“Thirty seconds and we shock.”
Alan stepped away from the table and brought the resus trolley over. My heart squeezed as I looked down at the young girl’s pale face. Her skin was already taking on a blue tinge as she was showing signs of Cyanosis. She wasn’t getting enough oxygen.
She was as good as dead.
I needed nothing short of a miracle to get her out of that theatre in anything other than a body bag.
I don’t know how it happened but after six hours and forty-seven minutes and another close brush we made it out of surgery with our patient holding on and fighting through. I’d managed to repair the Aortic valve. I still wasn’t sure whether that would be enough with all the trauma the organ had been through, but if there was ever a time for hoping and praying for some sort of divine intervention this was it.
I was beyond exhausted. I just wanted to get home and slip into bed beside Jamie. Right after I gave my baby a cuddle and told her how much I loved her.
That’s the thing about seeing a child on the brink of death, it made you very aware of how lucky you were to have a healthy child of your own. But for me, it also made me think of the not so lucky ones, like Theo, who didn’t make it.
I looked over her vitals one more time. The steady rhythm of the ventilator drowning out her mother’s sobs as
she sat there watching with equal parts dread and hope glimmering in her eyes. Her hands shaking above her child like she was scared to touch her. It was soul shattering witnessing her pain. One that although was foreign to me, at the same time was so familiar.
People often asked why and how I’d continued specialising in Paediatric heart surgery after what had happened, it was never something I could explain. But times like these, they were the reason. Maybe it was nonsensical and irrational, but watching and feeling that pain—a pain that was so unlike mine—a pain that wasn’t just a deep and cutting loss but the knowledge that your child was suffering, it made me grateful that I had been spared that.
I was grateful that my son had never felt pain. My baby had never known the panic and desolation of feeling life seep from him.
For that alone I was thankful.
It brought me a kind of begrudging peace in knowing that I’d done the suffering for him.
Looking at the utterly crippled woman sat there unsure of how to make it better for her daughter was crushing. She looked as small as her child. Her skin just as sallow.
“You can touch her…hold her hand.”
She sighed as her reddened eyes met mine.
Hell.
That was all I saw in that one look.
A long torturous sob ripped through her and slammed right into me.
“She doesn’t look like my little girl.” She whined as her hands grasped at the edge of the white sheet. Her eyes following me as I rounded the bed to her side. “I don’t want to hurt her. She looks so breakable…too pale. So cold.”
“She’s a fighter.” I crouched down as I took the small, cold hand in mine and placed it into her mother’s, “Here.”
She didn’t say anything, she just watched her child’s limp hand as it rested on hers and her tears spattered onto the lustreless skin. Her whole body shaking with her agony.
“Thank you.” She whispered.
She shouldn’t have thanked me. I didn’t want her to, and I don’t even know why but it just didn’t feel right. It never did.
It wasn’t until I’d filled the ward matron in on all the particulars that I left them. And by that time my shift was almost over. I had under an hour till I could go home and not worry about anything else other than sleep and the girls.
I couldn’t remember ever feeling this tired. I’d spent quite a few of my days off the last couple of weeks doing shift swaps so I could get the rest of the year off. Add all the late nights with Jamie to that and I was pretty much running on coffee, sex and well, sex really.
There was a lot of that happening. Probably more than I’d had in the last six or seven years. How Jamie still found it in himself to make it to the gym, I had no idea. The man was a machine. A very talented one at that.
Just the thought of him had me blushing. It wasn’t until yesterday morning that I realised that I’d let him do anything he wanted to me. Anything at all. And he knew it.
