Silent Night

Anatomy 101.  I was busy memorizing mnemonics:

Grandpa Shagging Grandma’s Love Child – for the top layers of the skin

Oh, Oh, Oh, To Touch And Feel A Greasy Vagina – for the cranial nerves

Swiftly Lower Tilley’s Pants To Try Coitus There - for the bones of the wrist

Pouring over the pictures in Gray’s Anatomy, I was like a Sydney taxi driver learning the city’s lanes, streets and highways off by heart, before being allowed to sit in the driver’s seat. I spent all my lunchtimes in the anatomy museum, surrounded by dissections preserved under glass, munching on chicken sandwiches and flirting with a second year student Daniel Markman.

It started when I was seventeen years old, during that first year at medical school. The onset was insidious, the symptoms barely perceptible at first. I started developing a condition I later recognized as tunnel vision of the soul. I could only see things that were straight in front of me; the rash, the clubbed fingers, the blue pursed lips of the man with emphysema.  I focused on the sickness and failed to notice the sick.

The first time I actually came right up close to a corpse was in dissection class. I pulled back the white sheet and stared at the grayish body, its mouth preserved in a distorted scream. We all stood back and let the anatomy tutor make the first incision, neck to pubis. By the end of that week the initial queasiness passed. Joel Newman ended up in the dean’s office for throwing a severed arm out of the first floor window, after he leaned out to ask the gardener below if he needed a hand.

That was only the start. After six years of practising digital rectal examinations on dying patients, asking old ladies about their sexual history, gossiping about the weekend over the comatose bodies of young accident victims in the intensive care ward, making out on Saturday nights with Rowan Matthews in the pan room of the emergency department, drawing straws to see who would get to go out and check that the body in the back of  the ambulance was really dead, coming back in and ordering pizza at 3am, extracting a hot water tap from a young man’s anus, and assisting at a post mortem on a two week old baby that had been drowned by its father, I finally emerged as a fully fledged doctor.

My visual fields widened one night, during a stint working as a junior intern in a children’s cancer ward. Being the only Jew on the team, I was rostered on for Christmas. There I was, stuck with sick kids, instead of pigging out on latkes for the first night of Hanukkah. The radio in the nurses’ station played Christmas carols:

Silent night, holy night

All is calm, all is bright

The nurses were busy organizing a Kris Kringle for the night staff. The matron, wearing a red and white Santa hat, unwrapped a liqueur chocolate and popped it into her mouth. Tinsel decorated the ward and branches of the plastic tree drooped heavily with the weight of little wooden angels.

I sat there holding the hand of six year old Joshua, who was dying of a rare bone cancer. He struggled to breathe as he raised his head from the pillow and looked down towards the foot of his bed. A pile of presents were stacked high, waiting to be opened the next morning.

“Will I be here in the morning to open my presents, Doc?” Joshua asked.

“Sure you will,” I turned away to fiddle with the intravenous drip.

The silence between us was punctuated by the mechanical beeping of the machine next to his bed. The Christmas carols droned on in the background.

I carefully adjusted the dose of pain-killer.

“Don’t lie to me” he said.

“Go to sleep, Joshua,” I said without looking at him, “Your presents will be here waiting for you when you wake up. Get some rest now.”

I scribbled something onto the drug chart at the end of his bed, in case he needed more pain relief through the night. I was in the thirty-sixth hour of a fifty-two hour shift. There is nothing worse than being woken at 3am by some dumb nurse, asking you to come up and write an order for paracetamol or a laxative, that you could have done earlier that evening. So I was tidying things up before I went down to the doctors’ quarters. I still had a long night ahead of me and was determined to get some sleep.

Santa would be coming in the morning. I was looking forward to some quiet tonight. I walked out of Joshua’s room and thought about buying a Mars bar from the vending machine, but I took the lift straight to the ground floor, staggered into the duty room and crawled into bed fully-clothed.

The call came in the middle of the night.

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