The Intern
He looked at the monitor. Asystole. He slid his fingers up to the carotid artery on the neck; to save time, he watched the chest for rise and fall, and felt for expiration on his cheek, while he tried to feel a pulse. None. Finally, he put the stethoscope in his ears, placed the diaphragm on the chest, and listened. He pronounced the patient “Dead” at 1:20 A.M. and ordered the nurse to notify the next of kin. He needed to get back to the call room and try to sleep.
Part of him screamed inside. These were human beings. They were someone’s mother or father, someone’s brother or sister. They were people. When had he stopped viewing them as human and started viewing them as tasks to check off on his overnight to-do list?
It was dehumanization by hundreds of individual cuts. He closed his eyes and thought back to the first week of medical school.
The room was cavernous and yet the strong pickle smell of formalin permeated the space. Most everyone looked awed and awkward as they unzipped the body bags. One cadaver to a group. The four newcomers, thrown together alphabetically, for the rite of passage to dissect their former person into the component anatomic parts for the knowledge of it. They sat around the table, and he picked up the scalpel, making his first incision into a human.
He thought back to the first history and physical he had completed. The middle-aged woman who reminded him of his mom. She had lost her balance on her way out of the office she worked in. The CT scan had shown enhancing lesions in the brain consistent with metastasizes, likely from a lung cancer. She had died within months.
He thought back to the first major case he assisted on, an open-heart bypass. The wonder he felt holding a beating heart in his hand. The distress when the family brought a hamburger and French fries into the patient. He had died of a heart attack within a year.
There would be many other pronouncements tonight.
