Sometimes patients come out of left-field and just floor you. One of the most common misconceptions about being a flying doctor is that most of the work you do involves shimmying heroically down a line out of a hovering helicopter followed by a touch of one-armed CPR whilst calmly marshalling the whole sorry mess to satisfactorily lifesaving conclusion. Clearly total bollocks. The truth is, with the odd exception, the vast majority of the work we do is what could be described as, well, routine. I accept that we are viewing ‘routine’ through the blood-and-guts-spattered lens of the aeromedical world here, but I guess everything’s relative.
So, setting off today to a nearby island to retrieve a patient who was acutely short of breath, routine was what I had in mind as I took part in/bore the brunt of the traditional cross-cabin abuse-fest laughably known as banter (I have it on reasonable authority that basic pommie doctor baiting is the most enthusiastically thumbed chapter in the Australian Aircrewman’s Handbook). After more of the above and some casual whale watching, we arrived and were ferried down to the island infirmary on the floor of a 1978 Toyota Hiace van driven by a ruddy-cheeked fellow who was clearly a bit ‘worse for the wear’. Now, after a few visits, I know the nurse who works here (a good egg by all accounts) and so I bowled into the infirmary expecting the hero’s welcome I’d come to expect – only to be faced with something no doctor wants or likes to see. A weeping family. Containing children. The reason this middle-aged man was short of breath was because his body was cut through with metastases. This was to be his last holiday with his young family and it had just ended before it had started. His 6 year old daughter hated me with a passion. And so it continued.
Throughout the indignity of the weighing-in session to see if we could actually take them with us, throughout the floor-of-the-van ride with the drunkest man in Australia and throughout the entire flight. This wasn’t lip trembling, stiff upper lip, silent tear from the corner of the eye stuff. This was real. This was full-throated anguish of the highest order. This was whole bodies expressing grief hitherto unexperienced stuff, and this was please God get me out of this unimaginable nightmare where my Dad’s going to die very soon and no-one can do anything about it stuff.
As doctors, we hate these sorts of things because they smash straight through the protective barrier we have been constructing around ourselves since medical school – it reminds us that we are human. However, like getting out of bed on a freezing cold morning to go running, we hate it but we know it’s good for us. Sometimes the patients that floor you are so unexpected that it’s not even the patient that does it, it’s their family.
