The Gift -
It was 11:30 PM and he was sitting in his car reviewing his day that had started at 9AM. There has been one simple open heart operation and then a second that was more challenging with seven partial blockages in the arteries requiring four vein bypasses and one arterial bypass to rework the amount of blood that would nourish each side of the heart. He had turned the engine of the BMW on and sat comfortably in its steady hum. Things were going well in his life, a beautiful wife, one son and one daughter, the new house. He had graduated from the University of Bombay, interned at Mount Sinai and then left when this local hospital had offered him a million dollars to help build their new heart center. Now settled into the community, the heart center had grown and had one of the best survival ratios in the country. But right at that moment he was going back over the last five hours and something did not quite seem right, he had some instinct that made him uneasy. In spite of the hour and long day, he turned off the engine, opened the door and made his way back to the Cardiac Thorasic Intensive Care Unit recovery area. There atmosphere was not calm, the patient was bleeding more than expected, his instinct was confirmed and he ordered them to return the patient to the operating room. The patient’s chest had been shut the sternum replaced and wired in; now all that had to be undone adding trauma. The problem was found and fixed, but the patient went into ventricular cardiac arrest with his heart stopping. This had not been expected and the heart lung machine was not ready so he plunged his hand in to the chest cavity and massaged the heart for ten minutes while that could be hooked up to the patient. He was concerned that the blood supply might not have been enough during this period and the brain might have been affected. The patient was now stabilized but not conscious when he went to inform the family what happened.
It was now 4AM (the original operation had begun at 3:45PM) and the patient’s wife and daughter had waited all that time and were distressed. The daughter wanted to see the patient so he took her to the operating room where she stroked her father’s forehead and hands and told him she loved him. Together they called to him to wake and after a bit the eyes fluttered and opened. With breathing tubes and drain and IV’s in place eye movement was the only form of communication. Eye movement showed recognition and acknowledgement. The patient
had been cooled for the operation but soon he warmed and color started to return and he was moved to the CTStepDown unit.
So now this patient had the gift of an extension to his life all because of that doctor’s instinct, that sense that something was out of balance. What is it that makes that happen? Was it the bond that had formed between the doctor and the daughter? He even had said that his patients are his family. Was it fate, the spirits, God nudging the universe? But why just now with this cast of characters? Was it a series of collected images that the doctor held from his university in Bombay, to Mount Sinai and through his 20 plus years of his career that set a model for what should be? Whatever it was the patient now was alive and struggling with the pains of recovery almost unaware of the gift. Sometime the best and most important gifts are the ones that we are not fully conscious of or that we take for granted; the steady love and support of family, or the effect of a sense of right or wrong that governs others who are part of our lives if only for a short time.
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