“…In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”
From “Musee de Beaux Arts” by W. H. Auden
In my first year of college, on my first rotation in the ER, I encountered my first dead body. My life had always been somewhat removed from death before then; thankfully, we’ve had no major deaths in our family, and the closest proximity I’d been to lifelessness was behind the screen in movies and TV shows. When I signed up for the night shift at our county ER as an EMT student, I expected to see the larger-than-life struggle between life and death, perhaps a code, and maybe I would do chest compressions and save a patient, or sit back exhausted when the doctors called the time of death with the secret comfort of knowing that I’d done all I could. It wasn’t a pleasant thought, but one I was prepared for nonetheless. What I encountered there instead was the aftermath: unexpected serenity.
As I walked into the ER in my new uniform and my backpack filled with bottles of Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee (it would be my first all-nighter since high school), I sensed an immediate heaviness in the room. My EMT school classmate, a girl who I only knew in passing, was wrapping up her shift. She gave me a weak smile and stepped out. As I introduced myself to the ER techs, I learned what had just happened. A 90-year old woman had been wheeled into the building on a code, the doctors had attempted to bring her back with cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and for maybe 10 minutes they had labored, unsuccessfully, to restart her heart. It was no use, I heard later. She was likely gone even in the ambulance. The girl before me had done compressions on that lifeless body. No wonder her smile was so weak – I wonder what mine would look like after going through that. Then came my first task as a fledgling EMT: bag and tag the body.
The ER tech guided me over to where she lay beneath a blanket. First came the tag. Like they do in the movies, I attached it around her toe. Her skin was cold; you always hear about how corpses are cold, but when you feel it yourself, there’s something deeply unsettling about it. Bodies are supposed to be warm, anything else simply feels wrong. Next, we pulled her onto her side. Rigor mortis had not entirely set in, so rolling her into the sleek black plastic bag took more effort than I had imagined.
“Treat her with respect,” cautioned the ER tech. He must have noticed me struggling to move her body. Gingerly, we moved her into the large bag and pulled the heavy zipper closed for delivery to the morgue. Around us, the doctors and nurses went about their business, seeing patients, wheeling monitors from room to room, writing notes on the hospital computers. The custodial staff swept the plastic wrappings of needles and monitor stickers off the ground. Someone had fallen out of the sky just moments before. Icarus had drowned, and just like in Breughel’s rendition of the fable, the ship continued to sail, the farmer continued to plow.
I understand why, I think. Doctors and nurses must move on quickly to prepare for the next patient, or for the next code. The rest of my shift was charged with nervous anticipation that I might have to spring into action at any time. Instead, it was quiet. The girl with the shift before me had gone home right after to sleep, burdened (or blessed?) with nothing but time and space to process the traumatic experience she had just gone through. She dropped out of the EMT class. Meanwhile, for the ER staff, the time for reverence and reflection was minimal. In a clinical world where schedules and lines of people waiting to be seen demand the utmost presence of doctors in the here and now, the 15-minutes-ago must be left in the past, the expensive delicate ship must set sail, the farmer must plow. But as I learned that day, even in those tiny in-between moments of a busy day, we can slow down time somewhat with those simple words: “treat her with respect.”
She never knew me. I never knew her. I didn’t even participate in her code, but after that day, practice codes began to feel real. As an EMT on my college campus, I later treated many altered and unconscious students (you know how college parties go). Every time I touched or moved them, I thought of those words again—"treat her with respect”—and the person in front of me became almost sacred. Every encounter has the possibility of transforming us. Even if the next patient is waiting and we must move forward, we don’t simply move on. How many lives and stories live within us, influencing our words and actions for every new patient we meet? She wasn’t even my patient, and yet I carried the memory of her with me as I became an EMT. I carry her memory with me today as a medical student.