I was a doctor for a day

Except there actually isn’t. The surgeons take control. More snapped orders: “laps, suction, I can’t find the bleed!” Oh, and that buzzword, “he’s in v-fib, charge to 200”. Pads slap against the chest of the unconscious patient, the shock torques the body nearly off the surgical table. And then a flatline on the monitor ticks […]

Except there actually isn’t. The surgeons take control. More snapped orders: “laps, suction, I can’t find the bleed!” Oh, and that buzzword, “he’s in v-fib, charge to 200”. Pads slap against the chest of the unconscious patient, the shock torques the body nearly off the surgical table.
And then a flatline on the monitor ticks upward into a sharp crest, a trough and goes regular onscreen. The doctors relax. Cut to intensive care unit, and when the end credits come up, the patient is fine. Forget Grey’s Anatomy. Real life, real medicine is far from television series, and it starts almost anticlimactically.
“Two-year-old, PDA, scheduled for a ligation of PDA,” is what should have been announced when the young patient was wheeled in at Garki Hospital. No announcement; that information was etched in red marker ink on a white board just behind the team of surgeons and nurses that surrounded the infant.
Doctors like their alphabet soup, but PDA is actually patent ductus arterosus. I checked it out before playing doctor for a day. In foetuses, the blood is the major medium for breathing, because the lungs don’t work at full capacity, and nutrition. A major open vessel at the top of the heart is crucial to this task.
That task ends at birth when the lungs kick in and the baby begins breathing on its own. At this point, the blood vessel should close between a day and a week.
In children with PDA—like Joanna and one in five babies born premature—that vessel stays open, though blood doesn’t flow out of it. The increased volume strains the heart, causing shortness of breath and increased risk of cardiac arrest.
Joanna couldn’t have undergone the surgery as a newborn, but without treatment, death was only a matter of time. In an outer room, her mother nervously watched, prayed and waited. Inside the theatre, a nurse ran through a checklist to ensure all instruments were assembled in their right numbers, order and position.
Joanna breathed with the help of respirators, as cardiac anaesthesist Dr Adetola Talabi put her under. Lead surgeon, Dr Sanusi, and his assistant, Dr Elijah Miner, picked their blade, declared “knife on skin” at 10:02am and the cutting started.
I didn’t have a blade, but I had on blue surgical scrubs, white plastic boots, half my face in a mask to keep the sterility of the theatre.
One cut in the left side of her back and blood flowed—but for only a second. In the next second came the faint smell of burning flesh as the diathermy was applied—a simple instrument that uses heat to cut and seal blood vessels under the skin to prevent excess bleeding.
A retractor fitted into the slit and opened Joanna further. Then the surgeons reached for her heart. It is painstaking, slowpaced and careful work. After all, her PDA is the hospital’s first.
Two things amaze me. First, these nurses and surgeons, whatever their age, will be on their feet throughout the operation, no matter how long it takes.
When people offer you a seat while asking if you are going to stand like a soldier or a policeman, they don’t really know what standing means until they’ve stood through hours of a surgery.
After two hours, I’m getting weary but can’t let it show. Besides, I’m too excited to let tired feet get in the way.
The second amazing thing is that I’m watching a life-and-death situation right before me. The blood that signifies life. The beep-beep-beep of monitors that indicate Joanna is still there. The gloved hands reaching into her body, moving one organ aside to reach for another, and she can’t protest.
It is a heady feeling—the realisation that there is only a thin line separating living from dying. And then the existentialist question “What is life, what is all of life’s struggles for?” kicks in.
Joanna weighed 770g, nearly half her twin, when she was born. Her growth stalled and she’s always been in and out of hospital, her paediatrician tells me. But how much all that matters is known only to her family.
The beeps and ticks drone out of hearing for a bit, then things kick up one the site of the PDA is tied off and cut. The repair has taken more than two hours when the surgeon declares an a-ok. They close her up, going back the way they went into her body, and finishing with suturing the slit in her back.
Minutes later, she’s in ICU to recuperate. Her chest rises faintly and falls with each tiny breath. Her mother keeps wake by her bed. “I never knew the outcome of all this,” her mother said later. “God used the doctors to do what we have been praying for all this time for our daughter.” And there are no end credits.