The Knife’s Edge. Stephen Westaby
on the wooden shards. Everyone knows what liver looks like from the butcher’s, while youthful lung is pink and spongy. I recognised both, and it made me sad.
In just seconds on a Saturday morning she had gone from vivacious carefree student to dying swan transfixed like a vampire. With every agonising breath, blood slopped from the wound edges. Whatever the way forward, I had to talk to her. I edged around the trolley and knelt by her head to distract her as the emergency doctors painfully probed with needles to locate an empty vein. With blood and froth dripping from her mouth, she was finding it difficult to breathe, let alone speak. We needed to put her to sleep right there in the ambulance, then get a tube into her windpipe – a seemingly impossible task in that awkward position. By now I was pretty sure that whatever we did she would die. If not soon, it would be in days or weeks as a result of infection and organ failure in the intensive care unit. So whatever else we attempted to do for her, we had to be kind. Do as little as possible to add to her pain.
Staring directly into her eyes I asked her name. I was simply trying to inject a semblance of humanity into the proceedings and relieve the brutality of it all. Stuttering between breaths, she told me she was a law student, like my own daughter Gemma, which added to my discomfort. I took her icy cold fingers in my right hand and rested my left hand on her hair, hoping to obscure that stake from her gaze.
With tears streaming down her cheeks she murmured, ‘I’m going to die, aren’t I?’
At that point I ceased being the surgeon because I knew she was right. For her last agonising moments on earth I could only comfort her. So I would be her substitute dad for that time. I held her head and told her what she wanted to hear. That we would put her to sleep now and when she awoke everything would be back in its place. The stake would be gone. The pain and fear would be gone. Her shoulders dropped and she felt less tense.
The gadget clipped onto her index finger showed very low oxygen saturation, so we had to move her to give the anaesthetist his chance with the endotracheal tube. Only then could we begin a token effort at resuscitation. I extended my hand to feel her belly, which was distended and tense. As we explained the need to move her, I could sense her consciousness fading.
She whispered, ‘Can you tell mum and dad that I love them, and I’m sorry? They never did want me to have that bike.’
Then she coughed up a plug of blood clot. As she rolled backwards the stake shifted, grating audibly against her shattered ribs. Her eyes rolled towards heaven and she slipped away. Whatever blood she had left in her circulation was pouring out over me. But I didn’t mind. It was a privilege to be there with her. The junior doctors from the resuscitation room stirred, intending to begin cardiac massage. Without hesitation I told them to back off. What the fuck did they expect to achieve?
The back of the ambulance fell silent with the horror of it all. I would have loved to have dragged that hideous fence post out of her chest – that had to be left to the pathologists. I couldn’t bring myself to watch her autopsy, but it confirmed that her diaphragm had been torn away and her pulped liver avulsed from the inferior vena cava.
That balmy summer’s evening I went walking through the bluebell woods of Bladon Heath with Monty, my jet black flat-coated retriever. While he chased rabbits, I sat on a fallen tree carpeted in moss and wondered if there was a God. Where was he on those fraught occasions when I needed some divine intervention? Where was he today when that poor girl tried to avoid hurting a deer and was killed by her kindness? I visualised her devastated parents sitting with a cold corpse in the mortuary, holding their daughter as I’d done in the ambulance, beseeching God to turn the clock back.
There was no point trying to be logical about religion. I knew that high-ranking Oxford – and indeed Cambridge – academics scoffed at the deity concept. Both Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking had that gold-plated atheistic confidence in their own abilities, spurning outside help. I guess I was the same. But I would still sneak into the back of a college auditorium and listen to debates on the subject. Some disputed God’s existence because of all the evil and misery in the world, and while I could identify with that, I had contrary and privileged insight through the odd patient who actually claimed to have reached the Pearly Gates before we clawed them back.
These vivid out-of-body experiences were rare but occasionally compelling. One spiritual lady described floating calmly on the ceiling as she watched me pumping her heart with my fist through an open chest. Forty minutes into this internal cardiac massage my thumb tore through into her right ventricle – she clearly recalled my words: ‘Oh shit, we’ve had it now.’ Fortunately, the perfusionists arrived with the circulatory support system I needed to keep her alive, and I succeeded in repairing the hole.
She uncannily related her memory of the events a number of weeks later in the clinic. Having been party to her own resuscitation attempts from above, she had floated through the clouds to meet with St Peter. This journey amid peace and tranquillity contrasted sharply with our gruesome efforts back down on the ground. But having arrived in heaven she was told she had to return to earth and wait her turn again – a ridiculously close-run thing between me and Grim Reaper. Perhaps God changed as he got older. Maybe he started out with the best of intentions but became cynical and less caring with time. Just like the NHS.
It was only after retiring from surgery that I began to reflect on my role in dispatching so many to that great hospital in the sky. One tranquil spot on the heath still holds a great deal of significance for me. It is a haunted place, a gap in the woodland that overlooks both Blenheim Palace, where my hero Winston Churchill was born, and St Martin’s Church, Bladon, where he is buried. A few yards from this clearing a jet plane that had just taken off from Oxford Airport crashed and exploded.
My son Mark was working for exams in his bedroom and watched the whole spectacle unfold. Heroically, he was the first to reach the drama in the field but could do nothing amid the conflagration. He watched the cockpit burn and cremate the occupants. Obviously at seventeen he had a different constitution to his lobotomised father, so the dismal spectacle disturbed him as it might any normal person. After dropping a single grade in biology he was dumped by his chosen university. I was very bitter about that. I still am.
One day when we reached this sacred ground, Monty spotted a stag silhouetted against the evening sky a hundred or so yards up the ride. A shaft of evening sunlight shone through the trees to illuminate a clump of fading bluebells, their heads dipping at the end of their season. Was that majestic stag in fact God looking down on me, surrounded by the spirits I had set free during my career, the ghosts of operations past?
In truth, I had always been a loner. I was still a restless insomniac who would wake in the early hours and write, making stupid notes on material I would never use, continuing to invent impossible operations that no one would ever perform. Did I miss surgery? Not at all, surprisingly enough. Forty years had been plenty. But it remained a great mystery to me how I had achieved so much from my humble beginnings in the backstreets of a northern steel town. Perhaps it was that battle to escape obscurity that provided the momentum. I wanted to be different, and I had the ruthless ambition to take on the system and overcome my past.
Although I spent my whole career writing textbooks and scientific papers for the profession, I reflected for many years on whether it was appropriate to discuss my battles in a public forum. Ironically it was my own patients who urged me to do so, even the loved ones of some who died. So many were eager for their stories to be told. From my own perspective, I always found the history of modern heart surgery to be among the most compelling stories ever told. As a trainee in London and the US I actually knew a number of the pioneers personally, and they had shared their own trials and tribulations with me face to face, encouraging me to make a difference, not to sit in the shadows avoiding conflict. And I certainly attracted trouble right from the start.
The government’s policy of releasing named-surgeon death rates to the press was another factor that edged me towards writing a tome for consumption by the general public. What is life really like on the other side of the fence? Is it different from being a statistician, politician or a journalist? The barrister and medical ethicist Daniel Sokol wrote in the British Medical Journal, ‘The public has an appetite for glimpses