Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery by Henry Marsh Read Free Book Online Page A

Korean woman, smiled apologetically but said nothing in reply.
    ‘The bloods had to be sent off again at six this morning,’ said the anaesthetist as she entered the room. ‘They had to be done again because yesterday’s bloods were on the old EPR system which has stopped working for some reason because of the new hospital computer system which went live today. The patient now has a different number apparently and we can’t find the results from all the blood tests sent yesterday.’
    ‘When can I start?’ I asked, unhappy at being kept waiting when I had a dangerous and difficult case to do. Starting on time, with everything just right, and the surgical drapes placed in exactly the right way, the instruments tidily laid out, is an important way of calming surgical stage fright.
    ‘A couple of hours at least.’
    I said that there was a poster downstairs saying that i CLIP , the new computer system should only keep patients waiting a few extra minutes.
    The anaesthetist laughed in reply. I left the room. Years ago, I would have stormed off in a rage, demanding that something be done, but my anger has come to be replaced by fatalistic despair as I have been forced to recognize my complete impotence as just another doctor faced by yet another new computer program in a huge, modern hospital.
    I found the junior doctors in the theatre corridor standing around the reception desk, where a young man was sitting in front of the receptionists’ computer with an embarrassed smile. He wore a white PVC tabard on which was stamped in friendly blue letters, on both back and front, ‘i CLIP Floorwalker’.
    I looked questioningly at Fiona, my senior registrar.
    ‘We’ve asked him to find the blood results for the brain tumour case but he’s not succeeding,’ she said.
    ‘I suppose I should go and apologize to the poor patient,’ I said with a sigh. I dislike talking to patients on the morning of their operation. I prefer not to be reminded of their humanity and their fear, and I do not want them to suspect that I, too, am anxious.
    ‘I’ve already told him,’ Fiona replied to my relief.
    I left the junior doctors and returned to my office, where my secretary Gail had now been joined by Julia the bed manager, one of our senior nurses, who is responsible for the thankless task of trying to find beds for our patients. There are never enough beds, and she spends her working day on the telephone, frantically trying to cajole other bed managers elsewhere to swap one patient for another or to take patients back from the neurosurgical wards so that we can admit a new one.
    ‘Look!’ said Gail. She pointed to the welcome screen for i CLIP that she had opened. I saw bizarre names such as Mortuary Discharge, Reverse Decease or Birth Amendments – each with its own colourful little icon – flash past as she scrolled through the long list.
    ‘I have got to select from this insane list every time I do anything at all!’ said Gail.
    I left her to her struggle with the strange icons and sat in my office doing paperwork until I was telephoned to be told that the patient had finally arrived in the anaesthetic room.
    I went upstairs, changed, and joined Fiona in the operating theatre. The patient, now anaesthetized and unconscious, was wheeled into theatre with a little entourage of two anaesthetists, two porters and U-Nok the ODA , pulling drip stands and monitoring equipment along with a tangle of tubes and cables trailing behind the trolley. His face was now hidden by broad swathes of sticking plaster, protecting his eyes and keeping the anaesthetic gas tubing and facial muscle monitoring wires in position. This metamorphosis from person to object is matched by a similar change in my state of mind. The dread has gone, and has been replaced by fierce and happy concentration.
    As the tumour was at the base of the man’s brain, and as there was the risk of heavy blood loss, I had decided to carry out the operation in what is called,