The blood of a man

He was an old man, one day out from a heart bypass surgery. There was a rush of blood from the chest tubes; his cardiac output that tanked, his blood pressure plummented.

"Get the nearest surgeon into this room, now!" the medical intensivist said. "I think he's in tamponade. We need to open his chest."

This is how I found myself in a room with a patient I didn't know, in an ICU I didn't follow, with fifty personnel buzzing around the room.

I rushed to remove the skin staples from incision down the middle of the man's chest. They're annoyingly difficult to get rid of, even more so when you're in a hurry. One of the staples ripped through my glove.

The trauma surgery fellow clipped the sternal wires and we spread open the sternum.

And there it was: the heart. A beating heart. In a pool of blood.

"He's going into V tach! Get the internal paddles!"

Someone handed me two long, black spatulas with wires attached to them.

Um...I'm not really sure where to put these...

"Charge to 50!"

And, uh, where exactly do the thingys go...

"Charged! Clear the bed, clear the bed!"

I think I'm holding these backwards...

"Shock him!"

Is there supposed to be a button...or something...?

"Shock him! Shock!"

I stuck what I thought was the business end of the spatulas in close proximity to the heart and pushed a red button. There was a satisfying thud, and the patient's body jerked slightly. The stunned heart jiggled for a half-second, then began to pump in synchrony.

"OK, good, good! Continue cardiac massage."

This pattern repeated itself about twenty times. Push some meds, pump the heart, shock the muscle. Push, pump, shock. Push, pump, shock.

The surgery resident across the bed gave me a look. The end was near.

When the code was finally called, I took off my gloves and went to the sink. Blood had seeped into the glove from the staple that punctured it earlier. I vigorously washed my hands and watched the blood of a dead man circle the drain.