Giving It All You've Got

One of Shroom's tricks manifests itself as pessimism. I prefer to think of it as realism, but it's really pessimism.

My reasoning runs thus: many of my patients will be in extremis, and I may well know their fate before they do. Worse, it may be obvious that, no matter what I do, the outcome will be grim.

So I try not to get my hopes up. This is not to say I don't go Full Tilt Kozmic Boogie, where it's apt, but thatI steel myself to the idea that despite it all, they're going to meet their maker.

It just hurts more when you invest a bit of your soul in the belief that they might just be ok.

Maybe this makes me less of a human, but that's how I choose to cope.

For example: a few days ago, a fella arrived, clapped out, with a history that screamed 'ruptured aneurysm'. A man of middling years, with belly-ache suddenly worsening, crashing blood pressure and fluctuating conscious level.

When he arrived, he genuinely was pale as a sheet.

That should tell you, as it did me, that he was only ever going to leave Hospital by the back door.

And yet...

Full Tilt Kozmic Boogie.

And it seemed to be working. His pressure cam up, he woke up, and the surgeons clustered, waiting. A little voice piped up: "Maybe... just maybe..."

But then he got to theatre, and the surgeons volte face-d.

Now, I'm not a vascular knifeman. Never was, so I'm sure the decision was the right one. Of course it was. And I knew he was never going to do, but we'd worked so hard to buff him, and had seemed to be working, so I thought he'd at least get knife to skin.

Somehow, it just seemed harder to take than if he'd never perked up at all.

Still; we tried, and maybe this means I do still have a soul.