In the five years I spent at medical school, I learned a lot about death. My classmates and I spent endless hours in a darkened lecture theatre, trying to understand the many and varied ways in which a body can malfunction. From flaws and failures on a microscopic, cellular level, to the signs and symptoms of thousands of diseases, which appear to lurk on the sidelines waiting to wage war against us.
There were times it felt quite miraculous that human beings managed to survive at all. In workshops, surrounded by real equipment and what were quaintly referred to as “fake patients” we acted out crash calls and emergency situations. We attempted to revive plastic dummies and sewed up oranges to hone our suturing skills.
During those very long years, as we forced knowledge into our exhausted brains, we acquired information about every possible way the human body can expire, what we might do to prevent it, and how to break the news to a patient when we can’t. Yet we didn’t really learn about death until after graduation. In August 2010 I walked onto a ward, with my shiny, new stethoscope and a combined sense of pride and sheer terror.
Twenty minutes later my bleep shrieked at me from my lapel, and I was given my very first job as a junior doctor. I had completed a workshop where I successfully certified the death of a fake patient (who then got out of bed and ate a cheese and pickle sandwich) and I had answered several exam questions on the subject without a backward glance. My patient was in a side room and the first thing I noticed when I walked in was how still the air was.
Beyond the closed door the rest of the ward moved on, but where I was standing it felt as though the world had been paused. Around me was the detritus of a long admission. A pile of old magazines and newspapers, get well cards stuck to the wall behind the bed, crumpled tissues and long-forgotten cups of tea.
I attempted to ignore all of these things and set about the task I had been trained to do. The patient was an elderly woman with tight grey curls and a face filled with aging and tiredness. Her death had been quiet and expected, but she gripped the bedclothes with both hands, as though she had tried to hold onto the world.
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