It never entered my mind that this was something that I, Ayala Rubin, could actually do
As told to Shoshana Gross
“The heart is a pump,” I remember one of my professors telling us in med school, as he pointed out the various parts on a clinical diagram.
The heart in front of me is… different. It’s pink and soft, the tracery of quivering red veins and arteries both fascinating and strange. And it’s in my hands. I’m squeezing rhythmically — it’s surprisingly easy — over and over, trying to keep the man on the stretcher alive.
IT starts with the piercing ring of my pager and the ominous words, “Code Trauma, Code Trauma,” repeated in that even, passionless voice on the overhead speakers. Before the echoes die away, I’m heading rapidly to the trauma bay. The first few days of my residency were filled with fruitless wandering through the warren of twisting, blindingly white, sterile corridors, but I’m finally making sense of the tangle, and I reach the room swiftly.
Residents and nurses converge from all directions in what looks like a chaotic mess but is really a carefully choreographed scene. The medics wheel a wounded man in on a stretcher, and I take up my place near where the patient’s right leg will be.
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