(Snippets from the frontline)
Life: On a finger tip
It was Code Trauma, knife to the heart. He came in after an apparent robbery with the knife still protruding from his chest.
I was fresh out of medical school in the busiest trauma center in the south, and dressed in scrubs and surgical mask.
Transferring him from the gurney to the trauma bed, the knife fell out with a gush of blood. Instinctively, I slapped my gloved hand over the entry wound without success, and then inserted my index finger into the hole quelling the bleeding.
I sat on top of the gurney as he was rolled into the operating room, feeling his heart pulsate on my finger tip. The patient was in and out of consciousness as they prepped him around me for surgery.
Two weeks later they gathered us together in the ER as the patient was being discharged and wanted to meet us.
His wife and two children thanked us profusely, and then he asked who stuck their finger in his heart. Everyone looked in my direction, and he rolled over in his wheelchair and extended his hand.
We touched finger tip to finger tip.
Life.
Gene Uzawa Dorio, M.D.
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