Death

Death is something that people imagine pathologists are surrounded by, although for most of us autopsies are not the majority of our workload. There is an assumption that we are unaffected by death since we apparently see it so often, but the reality is that a surprising number of pathologists chose the specialty partly to escape the distress and death we were seeing on the wards.

The number of people and families whose lives were shredded by disease and death that you can see in hospitals sometimes seems relentless. Maybe the ones who recover and the tales of hope are some compensation but the continual round of death in the face of your best medical efforts can get depressing. Non-medics imagine it gets easier but it doesn’t; something I realised when I was a house officer when I saw my macho surgical SHO crying on the ward after the death of a patient.

I was on the ward when one of our post-op patients started bleeding. It was several days since the operation and he had been doing well. I’d seen him on the ward round in the morning and he’d told us a joke but the next time I saw him he was grey and sitting in a pool of blood, blood down his chest and blood on the floor. Two of the other patients, both big men, were shuffling out of the bay, white-faced and shaking. We struggled to get a cannula in while the blood kept coming. I can still see the look of terror in his eyes.

The autopsy showed that a major artery had burst and there would have been no way we could have saved him.

Watching somebody die is not something I have to see at work anymore. A dead body is very different, the soul, if you believe in such a thing, has gone and looking into the eyes give no clue as to who once lived there. Dead bodies hold no horrors, the process of death is another matter.