Fragile Lives: A Heart Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table. Stephen Westaby
compliant and self-conscious. As one of the ‘promising’ set I was forced to work hard. I was a natural in art, although I had to stop those classes in favour of academic subjects. But one thing was clear. I was good with my hands, and my fingertips connected with my brain.
One afternoon after school I was out walking with Grandfather and his Highland terrier Whisky on the outskirts of town when he stopped dead on a hill, clutching the collar of his cloth shirt. His head bowed, his skin turned ashen grey and, sweating and breathless, he sank to the ground like a felled tree. He couldn’t speak and I saw the fear in his eyes. I wanted to run and fetch the doctor but Grandfather wouldn’t let me. He couldn’t risk being off work, even at the age of fifty-eight. I just held his head until the pain abated. It lasted thirty minutes, and once he’d recovered we slowly made for home.
His ill health wasn’t news to my mother. She told me that he’d been getting a lot of ‘indigestion’ while cycling to work. Reluctantly, Grandfather agreed to get off the bike, but it didn’t do much good. The episodes became more frequent, even at rest, and especially when he climbed the stairs. Cold was bad for his chest, so the old iron bed was brought down in front of the fire and the commode was carried inside to save a journey outdoors.
His ankles and calves were so swollen with fluid that he needed bigger shoes. It was a gargantuan effort just to tie his shoelaces, and from then on he didn’t get out much, mostly just moving from the bed to a chair in front of the fire. I’d sit and draw for him to take his mind off his rotten symptoms.
I remember that dismal wet afternoon in November, the day before President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. I came home from school to find a black Austin-Healey outside my grandparents’ house. It was the doctor’s car and I knew what that meant. I stared through the condensation on the front window but the curtains were drawn, so I went around the back of the house and walked in quietly through the kitchen door. I could hear sobbing and my heart sank.
The living-room door was ajar and inside it was dimly lit. I peered in. The doctor was standing by the bed with a syringe in his hand, and my mother and grandmother were at the end of the bed, clasping each other tightly. Grandfather looked leaden, with a heaving chest and his head tipped back, and frothy pink fluid was dripping from his blue lips and purple nose. He coughed agonally, spraying bloody foam over the sheets. Then his head fell to one side, wide eyes staring at the wall, fixed on the placard proclaiming ‘Bless This House’. The doctor felt for a pulse at his wrist, then whispered, ‘He’s gone.’ A sense of peace and relief descended on the room. The suffering was at an end.
The certificate would say ‘Death from heart failure’. I slipped out unnoticed to sit with the chickens in the air-raid shelter, and quietly disintegrated.
Soon afterwards my grandmother was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, which started to close off her windpipe. ‘Stridor’ is the medical term to describe the sound of strangulation as the ribs and diaphragm struggle to force air through the narrowed airway, and that’s what we heard. She went to Lincoln, forty miles away, for radiotherapy, but it burned her skin and made swallowing more difficult. We were given some hope of relief by an attempted surgical tracheostomy, but when the surgeon tried to do it he couldn’t position the hole low enough in the windpipe below the narrowing. Our hopes were dashed and she was doomed to suffer until she died. It would have been better if they’d allowed her to go under anaesthetic. Every evening I sat with her after school and did what I could to make her comfortable. Soon opiate drugs and carbon dioxide narcosis clouded her consciousness, and one night she slipped away peacefully with a large brain haemorrhage. At sixty-three she was the longest-lived of my grandparents.
When I reached sixteen I took a job at the steelworks in the school holidays, but after a collision between a dumper truck and a diesel train hauling molten iron they dispensed with my services. I spotted a temporary portering job at the hospital and negotiated the role of operating theatre porter. There were disparate groups to please. The patients – fasted, fearful and lacking dignity in their theatre gowns – required kindness, reassurance and handling with respect. Junior nurses were friendly and fun, the nursing sisters were self-important, bossy and business-like, and needed me to shut up and do what they told me, and the anaesthetists didn’t want to be kept waiting. The surgeons were simply arrogant and just ignored me – at first.
One of my jobs was to help transfer anaesthetised patients from their trolleys onto the operating table. I knew what sort of surgery was planned for each one, having read the operating list, and I helped out by adjusting the overhead lights, focusing them on the site of the incision (as an artist I was intrigued by anatomy and had some knowledge of what lay where). Gradually the surgeons began to take notice, some even asking me about my interest. I told them that I’d be a heart surgeon one day, and soon enough I was allowed to watch the operations.
Working nights was great because of the emergencies: broken bones, ruptured guts and bleeding aneurysms. Most of those with aneurysms died, the nurses cleaning up the corpses and putting on the shrouds, me hauling them from the operating table and onto the tin mortuary trolley, always with a dull thud. Then I’d wheel them off to the mortuary and stack the bodies in the cold store. I soon got used to it.
Inevitably my first mortuary visit took place in the dead of night. The windowless grey brick building was set apart from the main hospital and I was frankly terrified of what I’d find in there. I turned the key in the heavy wooden door that led directly into the autopsy room but when I reached inside I couldn’t find the light switch. I’d been given a torch and its beam danced around as I plucked up the courage to go in.
Green plastic aprons, sharp instruments and shiny marble sparkled in the gloom. The room smelt of death, or what I expected death to smell like. Eventually the torch beam settled on a light switch and I turned on the overhead neons. They didn’t make me feel any better. There were stacks of square metal doors from floor to ceiling – the cold store. I needed to find a fridge but wasn’t sure which ones were empty.
Some doors had a piece of cardboard slotted into them with a name on it, and I figured that they must be occupied. I turned the handle on one without a name, but there was a naked old woman under a white linen sheet. An anonymous corpse. Shit. Try again on the second tier. This time I was lucky, and I pulled out the sliding tin tray and pushed the creaking mechanical hoist towards my stiff. How to make this thing work without dropping the body on the floor? Straps, crank handles and manhandling. I just got on with it and slid the tray back into the fridge.
The mortuary door was still wide open – I didn’t want to be shut in there alone. I sped out and pushed the squeaking mortuary trolley back to the main hospital ready for the next customer. I wondered how pathologists could spend half of their career in that environment, carving entrails from the dead on marble slabs.
Eventually I charmed an elderly female pathologist into letting me watch the autopsies. Even after witnessing some disfiguring operations and terrible trauma cases this took some getting used to, young and old sliced open from throat to pubis, eviscerated, scalp incised from ear to ear and pulled forward over the face like orange peel. An oscillating saw removes the cranium, as if taking the top off a boiled egg, and then the whole human brain lies in front of me. How does this soft, grey, convoluted mass govern our whole lives? And how on earth could surgeons possibly operate on this, a wobbly jelly?
I learned so much in that dingy, desolate autopsy room: the complexity of human anatomy, the very fine line between life and death, the psychology of detachment. There was no room for sentiment in pathology. An ounce of compassion there may be, but affinity with the cadaver? No. Yet personally I felt sad for the young who came here. Babies, children and teenagers with cancer or deformed hearts, those whose lives were destined to be short and miserable or had been terminated by a tragic accident. Forget the heart as the source of love and devotion, or the brain as the seat of the soul. Just get on and slice them up.
Soon I could identify a coronary thrombosis, a myocardial infarction, a rheumatic heart valve and a dissected aorta, or cancer spread to the liver or lungs. The common stuff. Charred or decomposed bodies smelt bad, so Vicks ointment stuffed up the nostrils spared your olfactory nerves. I found suicides to be terribly sad, but when I verbalised this I was told to ‘Get over