Confessions of a GP - Benjamin Daniels [53]
Dead people
I’ve seen loads of dead people but I’m still quite scared of corpses. As a hospital doctor, one of my jobs was to go and certify death. During a night on call, I would be covering ten or more wards and be up most of the night doing odd jobs and reviewing sick patients. I recall one night when, after having just got to bed at about 4 a.m., my pager went off. The nurse on one of the geriatric wards told me that one of the patients had died. It was an expected death so although there was no resuscitation and CPR necessary, a doctor needed to certify the death before the body could be taken to the morgue.
It was a cold dark night and I had to force myself out of my warm bed to make the long trudge from the on-call room to the hospital. ‘Room 12,’ the nurse said as I wandered on to the ward. Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I stumbled into the darkened side room. To certify death, a doctor has to ensure the patient isn’t breathing, that his heart isn’t beating, that his pupils are fixed and dilated and that he doesn’t respond to pain. The pain response is usually elicited by rubbing your knuckles really hard onto the front of the person’s chest. It is call it a sternal rub. It hurts like hell and we also use it a lot on alive patients in A&E, as it wakes people from even the deepest drunken stupor. The room was dark and quiet and I was all alone with the body lying in the bed in front of me. Still half-asleep I decided to start with the pain response. As I pressed my knuckles hard onto the corpse’s chest, it jumped up, grabbed my hand and let out an ear-piercing scream. This was soon joined by an equally loud and terrified scream that was being emitted by me. The nurse then flew into the room and said, ‘Sorry, Doctor, did I say room 12? I meant room 10.’
Holistic earwax
Veronica Davis rarely came to see me as she favoured alternative medicine to the more conventional kind that I was attempting to practise. The very fact that she was in my consulting room that morning suggested that she must have been fairly desperate to have ventured in to see me.
‘Hello Ms Davis, how can I help you today?’
‘I don’t care what you say, I’m not seeing a surgeon. I won’t let those barbarians invade me with their implements of torture.’
‘I’m sorry, Ms Davis, but I’m not quite sure what the problem is.’
‘I’ve got a serious ear problem, but I swear to God I’ll die before you send me to one of those filthy disease-ridden hospitals. I know my rights. My body is my body and I’ll be the one who decides if it gets chopped open, thank you very much.’
‘First things first, let’s have a look in that ear, shall we? Hmmm. Seems it is a bit blocked up with some earwax.’
‘Does it need an operation?’
‘No, I think some olive oil drops should do the trick.’
Ms Davis had clearly been expecting to have to fight me and 20 others off her as we forced her into a waiting operating theatre to be sliced open by some bloodthirsty surgeons. I don’t have many friends who are surgeons and you won’t often find me first in the queue to defend them, but I do think they are perhaps misrepresented sometimes. The alternative medicine brigade needs to realise that surgeons don’t cut you open for fun. They would probably rather be playing rugby or getting very drunk and accusing each other of being gay. That is what they like doing best. They will only cut you open if they really have to. If you decide you don’t want to be operated on, they will be only too happy to have one less patient on their ever-growing waiting lists. Very few surgeons are good at the touchy-feely sensitive stuff, but then us touchy-feely GPs would be rubbish at fixing a broken pelvis or repairing a burst aorta. You should see the mess I make trying to carve a roast chicken! We each have our skills and if it were me that was in need of an operation, I would happily put