The first time I saw someone die, it felt like a joke and I simply wasn’t ready for it. I was seated beside the fellow, absentmindedly listening to him as he talked with someone else who was seated adjacent to us. Without warning, he suddenly fell on my thighs and breathed his last. My first words were “get up, you know you weigh a ton “ (I said that jokingly, like I always do).
It was not until 4 different doctors certified him dead before I could believe the fellow had actually passed on. It took 7 months of trauma and living in denial before I could come to terms with the fact that I’d never hear this person talk again. Till date, I still grope mentally when trying to navigate that event.
ps: that weighty fellow was my dad. read more here
The second experience had the same effect on me, I still wasn’t ready. This time around, I walked into my patient’s room, introduced myself and took her consent to check her blood pressure. She replied, “go ahead”. I inflated the cuff of the sphygmomanometer and set the stethoscope to my ears, hoping to hear some real korotkoff sounds but I heard nothing.
I inflated again because as expected, every living human should have a recordable systolic blood pressure but still there was no sound.
By the time I looked up to tell the senior doctor that I wasn’t hearing anything, the patient had already breathed her last breath.
That day was my first day at work. Talk about ‘gbas-gbos’.
Strike 2, we immediately started CPR (a super-hero energy sapping exercise we doctors love to do to raise the dead?). Pushed 1ml of adrenaline to woo her heart into beating once more and all through the time , I kept asking myself “Is this how it happen to all of us ?”
We continued the CPR for 45 minutes, pushed in more adrenaline, intubated and did every other thing medically possible. All through the while, I was in turmoil because for starters, nature was calling for the major ?, hunger pangs were liquefying my empty stomach, my uterus was grating away at what little strength I had in my body and my mind was stuck on a strange loop chyming repeatedly “is this how it will happens to all of us?”
These days, it’s more or less easy, I can recognize the wink of death in a human body even when it’s in denial, especially after the soul has long departed. It’s now easy for me to interpret the inevitable events once I see the human heart desperately swinging from hypertension to persistently low BPs despite tons of NORAD.
I understand what’s coming once I see two weak lungs gasp in unison and pant in defiance for the air we carelessly pollute with tobacco, as they refuse to be dragged into the peaceful oblivion that death is.
I now know that dying is easy, living is hard! Moreso, living intentionally. We will all die, whether we are ready or not. Struggling to stay alive is what saps the energy out of a man. Knowing this, I ask myself, am I ready?
Since I’m not ready to die, the least I can do is be ready to live. And not just live, but live intentionally, to choose the life that I want even when walking through the valley of death. I choose to live like I mean it, not absentmindedly but living everyday with the intention to live.
ps: I do hope you got all the pun intended??