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| Our very own medical miracle. |
The two paramedics who came to my rescue a month ago told me that they would soon be featuring in a documentary being made by Channel 4 about King’s College Hospital Accident & Emergency department. The first episode of “24 Hours in A&E” was broadcast a couple of nights ago and Anita and I just watched it today (courtesy of our V+ box) over lunch. I’m still not sure whether watching it with food was a good idea. We didn’t get to see my two paramedics, although we did see a man who had fallen off his bike and knocked himself out; a 77 year old man who landed on his head after falling ten feet from a ladder balanced at the top of some stairs; and a Greek student who had been run over by a bus. When the ambulance arrived he was still under the bus, literally folded in half, so that his face was touching his feet. Unbelievably he was still conscious. Within half an hour of being admitted to A&E he had had the entire quantity of his blood replaced and X rays revealed that his pelvis resembled (to quote the trauma consultant) “a jigsaw puzzle”. Without wanting to spoil it, everyone survived, although it was definitely touch and go for the bus-crash dude. They returned to him once he could walk again, three months and over thirty hours of surgery later. He was unable to remember anything from immediately before the accident until he woke up in hospital a month later.
Two things occurred to me whilst watching this. First, an insight into 24 hours in an emergency room certainly puts a different perspective on things – as the consultant pointed out, “a lot of people talk about being a lawyer or a banker as a stressful job. But I’d rather lose a few million pounds of someone’s money than do something wrong and lose someone’s life.” Well put, I think. He is undoubtedly at the top of his game yet still confessed to going home and lying awake wondering whether he’d done the right thing with each of his patients that day. It made me realise that being a lawyer is, relatively speaking, (a) a piece of cake; and (b) not a very important job.
Second, the programme reminded me just how incredible medical science is. In fact, not only medical science, but the human body itself. I watched another programme on BBC1 the other night, called “Inside the Human Body” (I am watching a LOT of telly at the moment). This programme started with footage of a woman giving birth in a bath (filmed using an under-water camera no less – nothing was left to the imagination) and ended with a man dying of old age. In between was an hour of the most amazing telly I have seen for a long time. I watched a team of surgeons cut open a woman’s chest, stop her heart, zap some individual cells (just the bad ones, taking care not to damage the good ones) and then start her heart again an hour later. And a man called Vim went for a 15 minute swim in a lake in Iceland where the water was only two degrees above freezing (he sang Icelandic folk songs as he swam circles around an iceberg). I now know that every minute of every day I take around sixteen breaths without having to think about it. And from the time I was a three week old embryo, cells in what would become my heart first beat and, all being well, will continue to do so, without tiring, another two and a half thousand million times. Inside my bones, 150 million red blood cells die - and are reborn - every minute, my skin replaces itself entirely every three months, and every ten years I get a brand new skeleton. I also learned that I could derive sufficient energy needs to survive from a diet consisting entirely of pickled onion Monster Munch.
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