On seeing Roses

A year ago, I met my neighbour, Gary, while he was in sudden cardiac arrest. Despite living on the same hallway for 3 years, we had never noticed one another. Our introduction that day began with a rather unconventional handshake: the jarring compressions of the heels of my hands against his sternum. I met his wife Rose that day too. She stood barefoot on the cold cement outside of our building and watched in horror. With each compression of Gary’s chest—“One and two and three and”—Rose screamed protests: “No! No! No!” The setting was hardly ordained for neighbourly relations. After 6 minutes of cardiac arrest and 4 minutes of CPR, the emergency medical services arrived with the defi brillator that shocked Gary’s heart back to life. He was quickly sent to the hospital across the street where he was cooled for 48 hours to decrease the metabolic demands left on his body from his heart’s hiatus. This left us all with the chilling uncertainty of what he might be like when he woke up. I was scheduled to be on call at the same hospital that night and debated whether visiting Gary and Rose would be an invasion of their privacy. I had already rifl ed through their apartment to fi nd a pair of shoes for Rose, who had climbed into the ambulance in her pink pyjamas and bare feet, but still I hesitated. Somehow visiting them in the hospital seemed like a disregard of patient privacy. Nevertheless, I decided I would rather apologise for my empathy than for my apathy. That night in the cardiac intensive care unit, a loose, yet intense relationship formed between two neighbours. Sitting by the foot of Gary’s hospital bed, Rose and I met for the fi rst time that she could remember. I retold the day’s events, as none of them were clear to her anymore. After there was nothing left to recount, the whirring rasps of Gary’s ventilator fi lled the medicated air between us, pronouncing our unfamiliarity with one another. We hugged and said goodbye. Against most published and anecdotal evidence, Gary woke up 2 days later with all of his faculties intact. After an automatic implantable cardioverter defi brillator was placed, he was discharged home, with the only external evidence of his ordeal the card-deck-sized lump beneath his skin where the device sat. In the weeks that followed, I seemed to run into Gary and Rose more than I had ever noticed before. Every time I saw Rose in the hallway of our apartment building she would throw her arms around me, thanking me for what I had done. As she pulled away, she would hold my shoulders and promise me that this would be the last time she greeted me in such a way. Eventually, her promises held true, but the length of our chance encounters never shortened. Now, when we meet over laundry or hurried exits from the building, we pause and talk about the important events in our lives. Not the mundane errands we need to run or the deadlines we need to meet, but rather “Gary had his retirement party this weekend” or “Our doctors said we are cleared to travel”. I’ve noticed how Rose’s adoration for Gary pulses through her. Her reality of nearly losing him is apparent in the way she talks, breathes, sees. Her gratitude for still having her partner is equally clear each time we talk. Running into Rose, once awkward and uncertain, is now restorative and heartening. In many ways, Rose and her husband have been as therapeutic to me as I ever was to them. Before the day of Gary’s arrest, I saw home as my place away from work, a refuge from stress, obligations, and medicine. I never imagined that I would be called to use my medical knowledge in this safe haven, and I was grateful for that. As a fourth-year surgical resident, I was burnt out, wondering why I had ever committed myself to such a gruelling, unrewarding, and debilitating life. Despite countless hours in the hospital, young surgical residents, mired by constant pages, orders, and Lancet 2014; 384: 2264–65