“HI doc, We have a BID (brought in dead) in the ambulance. Can you check her out, so we can take her straight to the morgue. We’ve got a good game of three card brag going, we’d like to get back to ASAP. Do us a favour and make it snappy.”

“I’ve got a winning hand in my pocket” said one of them with a wink.

“She’s the deadest one we’ve picked up for a long time and an old regular of ours. Always over dosing, looks like she has succeeded this time round”.

Both ambulance officers were standing impatiently. She weighed about 15 stone or more and she felt like an ice block. She’d been found under a bush in the park at 2am and it was winter. There was an empty bottle of barbies near her.

I rolled her over and her back was blue and marbled. There was extensive venous pooling. There was no signs of breathing. I could not feel a pulse, anywhere. There was no heart beat to hear. Her pupils were dilated and non reactive. I couldn’t see the backs of her eyes, her retinae. Her cornea were cloudy. She looked as dead as dead could be. And yet I had a sense of unease. Nothing I could explain.

I felt compelled to take her into the resus room. I tried to think of a good reason for my coming request to the ambulance officers and especially for the one with the good brag hand. I asked them to take her to resus.

“Come on doc. You’ve got to be joking. She’s dead. She couldn’t be deader”. They looked at me as if I was off my trolly, nuts. I decided a little white lie was in order.

“I’l let you into a secret, you guys. I’ve got nothing to do and I want to practice intubation and internal juglars. I’m a bit rusty and I start a new job soon. I am supposed to be a gung ho at these procedures. I exaggerated my skills at a recent interview”.

“Oh, okay”. They were po’d with me but hey, it was my call.

They shipped her in. In better light she looked even deader. It was like she’d been in the morgue freezers for a couple of days. I put a tube in her lungs and connected her to a ventilator. ‘ This is ridiculous’, I was thinking to myself. I placed a line into one of her internal jugular veins and put up a bottle of fluid. I connected her to an ECG monitor. No heart beat. I walked out of the room and started off down the corridor.”BEEP” went the ECG machine. I turned round in a flash.

Could I see a faint dying impression of a heart beat on the oscilloscope. I stood there a minute, well it seemed like that. Nothing. I walked off down the corridor again. BEEP. This time I stayed in the room. After a couple of minutes. BEEP and there on the screen was electrical evidence of a heart beat. OMG!

Every couple of minutes the machine beeped. ‘Jesus, this woman isn’t dead’.

“Is that the medical registrar, . . . Good, Can you come down please? We have some thing you ought to see”. He began to question me as he was trying to avoid getting out of his warm cozy bed and no doubt he was short on sleep.

“Just get out of your pit”. I told him, “And get your arse down here pronto.”

I was going to have a hard job keeping the crash team in the room long enough to see and hear the BEEP.

“F, ..ing hell Bell! For christ’s sake. You’ve got me out of my bed to treat a corpse”. He was really pissed.

“She’s as bloody dead as I’ve ever seen anyone. Thank you for wasting my time. How long have you been qualified? Idiot”. He turned to walk out.

‘Come on monitor, beep please’, I pleaded silently. Just imagine if it didn’t BEEP again. No one would believe what I’d seen and heard. Another couple of doctors arrived – the rest of the crash team. Their response was in a similar vein, plenty of swear words and jokes flying about at my expense.

“Don’t go yet. Just wait a bloody minute you lot. She ain’t as dead as you think. You are in for a major surprise”.

He opened his mouth to give me, I imagine, a few more expletives. When my faithful machine BEEPed.

“Jesus Christ”, said the medical registrar. “That’s a normal looking QRS complex on the ecg tracing. She must be alive. She must be very cold”.

“She is,” I said. I suggested t he put a finger in her rectum. Like I had done earlier.

“My God, it’s icy cold in there. Like sticking your finger in ice cream.'”

“Amazing”, I replied. “I very nearly certified her dead and send her to the morgue. I think you owe me an apology”. I said grinning from ear to ear.

They took her too ICU. She was slowly warmed up over the next couple of days. She walked out of hospital none the worse for her experience, so I was told. To this day, I don’t know why I did what I did. I don’t know what compelled me to take her to resus. She could have been buried alive or woken up in a morgue shelf.

Comment.

What our senses tell us is a fact, isn’t necessarily so. This lady was dead and she lived. She used barbiturates to overdose with and took them one winter’s night in a windy and freezing park. Barbiturates decrease the bodies requirements for oxygen and so does the cold. This lady had preserved herself. She was hibernating. I wonder how many people like her have ended up in a coffin, scratching the inside of the box.

Following impulse, intuition or whatever sometimes comes up trumps. If I’d followed logic, she might have given the mortician a shock by banging on the fridge door. If I’d followed other people’s opinion?

I found out later it was this lady’s sixth attempt at committing suicide. Did I do her a favour? Who knows? Doctors are obliged to save a life if it is within their ability. It is not within their right not to. The safest act for a doctor is to save life, as the person will have another chance to die. If death is allowed, there is no coming back.

How can doctors judge the quality of life or for another? Some folk, in some very uncomfortable looking bodies, prefer life to death. They have enough to make life worthwhile. While some with wonderfully functioning bodies don’t have apparently enough to make life worth living.

There is a saying. ‘Not dead, until warm and dead‘. Poking my finger in this woman’s rectum was an eye popping and one time in my lifetime experience – it was so cold in there.

My great great (?how many greats) grandfather Charles White‘s was well known for a few things one of them was the Manchester Mummy. For your interest and to blow my family trumpet he was onto preventing fever of pregnancy before Semmelweis.