an itinerant observer

Illustration / Photo-credit: Saniya Kamal Imagine yourself as an ER nurse or physician. Then imagine a parent bringing to you their dead child, with the expectation that you will bring her back to life. What do you do? This happened to me, yet again. The overhead page for pediatric resuscitation was met with the routine ‘rapid response team’ deploying itself from the pediatric ward to the ER ‘resus’ room. There we met a distraught father who had brought in Sasha, his 2-year-old daughter. Once I took stock of the situation, I realized this was a no brainer: I was to follow the pulseless and apneic child (that is, neither heart nor lungs functioning) algorithm from the American Heart Association’s Pediatric Advanced Life Support guidelines.  “Dead child -> go directly to Cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR) -> do not pass Go, do not collect $200!” a professor from my residency years would remind us, specifically for that situation.   I im...

As a young physician I would challenge the potential fatality of illness, and my medical chutzpah pooh poohed the concept of being on death’s door. Now that I’m older and hopefully wiser, I think I have overcome some of the discomfort that thoughts of dying and death generate. I understand that illness, dying and death are along a continuum. My recent exposure to illness, dying and death, in my own patients, family or friends, makes me ponder my own mortality. From a non medical perspective, overcoming fear of death is part of life. I think our concept or definition of death is somewhat limited and restrictive. If you consider dying and death to be a journey then that realization can be quite emancipating and exhilarating. You are then more likely to embrace both life (and death?) more passionately. One of the hardest things for any parent to deal with is the death of their child. As part of the kindergarten diaries, I wrote about the life and death of the baby with the bucket...

Ali* was on bed 16. He was 10 months old and critically sick. Till the day before, per his mother, Ali had been quite normal. He had been taken to a neighbor’s house by the neighbor’s daughter. This was not the first time the neighbor’s child had carried Ali to her house, to play with him. However, what was different this time around was that the child brought Ali back soon after taking him, presumably because he was fussy. That occurrence in itself could have been a potent reminder for the parents to suspect something. The parents, unfortunately, let hours pass assuming that Ali was just colicky. When Ali went from being fussy to lethargic his parents panicked and rushed him to a nearby clinic. That facility was far from optimal to take care of the baby, given his critical condition, hence the parents decided to bring Ali to the emergency room (ER). Ali was in a terrible condition hence he was rushed directly to ‘resus’ (resuscitation or shock room). He was gasping, periodically...