I wasn't prepared to witness my first death. Not in the first year of med school. Not a sudden death of a 53-year-old. Not in a community clinic. Not as a distant observer who had no rights to even stand at the other side of the half-drawn curtain.
I expected an emergency case to be... Well... More like an emergency. Doctor throwing orders, nurses and assistants dashing across the room, wheeling machines and fetching instruments. It wasn't like that.
Her oxygen mask was handheld by an assistant, who later taped it to her with strips of micropore. There was no defibrillator, no '1, 2, 3, clear'. The ECG machine wasn't bleeping. It was a flat line.
There were two handful of people taking turns to pump her chest, 3 tubes of adrenaline injected into her bloodstream, a tube stuck down her throat to try to assist her breathing, her daughter, still clueless of her absent pulse standing outside clutching on her phone, and a flat ECG. That poor girl, uninformed that she lost her mother to 3 days of fever, a breathless morning and an unknown cause of death.
"Dia pengsan," (she passed out) her daughter told me calmly, as they resuscitated her in the car. She was just standing there and looking, strong as a tower, thinking that her mother would just return from unconsciousness in no time, I suppose. It was her fist time collapsing, despite a long history of inherited hypertension and acquired diabetes.
I did not stay on to watch the doctor break the news to her daughter, but seeing her sobbing silently, fingers trembling, sitting alone at the far corner of the room. It was enough to feel a twist in my heart. The twist became a knot when the rest of the family arrived. Although filled with grief, they had to arrange the logistics with the police. The body wasn't released. An autopsy had to be done. As if losing her wasn't enough, she had to be tore apart.
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