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

the scan appear on the computer monitor, gradually working their way up towards where I had been operating. The scan showed a huge haemorrhage deep in her brain, on the side of the operation although slightly separate from it. It was clearly both inoperable and fatal – a post-operative intracerebral haemorrhage, a ‘rare but recognized’ complication of such surgery. I picked up the phone in the control room and rang her husband.
    ‘I’m afraid I have rather bad news for you . . .’ I said.
    I went round to the surgical sitting room and I lay on the sofa, staring at the sky through the high windows, waiting for her husband and daughter to arrive.
    I spoke to them an hour later in the little interview room on the ITU . They collapsed into each other’s arms in tears. Dressed in my theatre pyjama suit, I looked on miserably.
    As she was going to die the nurses had moved her into a side room where she lay on her own. I took her husband and daughter to see her. They sat down beside her. She was unconscious and mute, her eyes closed, with a lop-sided bandage around her head beneath which her bloodied hair hung down. The ventilator which was keeping her alive gently sighed beside her.
    ‘Are you really sure she cannot hear anything we say to her?’ her daughter asked me.
    I told her that she was in a deep coma but that even if she could hear she would not understand what she heard since the haemorrhage was directly in the speech area of her brain.
    ‘And will she have to stay in hospital? Can’t she come home?’
    I said that I was certain that she would die within the next twenty-four hours. She would become brain dead and then the ventilator would be switched off.
    ‘She’s been taken from us. So suddenly. We were going to do so many things together in the time we had left, weren’t we?’ her husband said, turning to his daughter as he spoke. ‘We weren’t ready for this . . .’ He held his daughter’s hand as he talked.
    ‘I trusted you,’ he said to me, ‘and I still do. Are you certain that she might not wake up? What if she wakes up and finds that we aren’t here? It would be so frightening for her although I know she kept on telling us last week that she did not want to be a burden to us.’
    ‘But love is unconditional,’ I said and he burst into tears again.
    We spoke for a while longer. Eventually I turned to the door saying that I had to leave or I would start crying myself. The husband and daughter laughed at this through their tears. As I left I thought of how I had granted her wish, albeit inadvertently, that she should not die miserably as her father had done.
     
    Back in the operating theatre Patrik was having difficulties stopping the bleeding after removing the disc prolapse in the third and last case on the list. I cursed and abused him half-jokingly and scrubbed up and quickly brought the bleeding under control. We closed up the man’s incision together and afterwards I returned to the ITU to see Melanie. She was peacefully asleep and her baby son was asleep in the cot beside her. Her observation chart showed that her pupils were now reacting to light and the nurse looking after her said that all was well. There was a small group of laughing and smiling nurses beside the cot looking at the baby.
    Her husband rushed up to me, almost delirious with joy.
    ‘She can see again! You’re a miracle worker Mr Marsh! She woke up from the op and she could see the baby! She said her eyesight’s almost back to normal! And our son is fine! How can we ever thank you enough?’
    What a day, I thought as I went home, what a day. When I recounted this story – which I had quite forgotten until then – to the Holby City writers gathered round the hotel table, they broke out in little cries of delight and amazement, though whether they used the story about Melanie or not, I do not know.
     

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    TIC DOULOUREUX
     
    pl.n. brief paroxysms of searing pain felt in the distribution of one or more