Doctors feel just as emotional as family and friends when their patients make miraculous recoveries, a heart-warming book extract has revealed.
Aoife Abbey, an intensive care registrar at University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust, regularly deals with patients hanging in the balance between life and death.
In her new book, ‘Seven Signs of Life’, she told the story of Pat, a man who fell from scaffolding and spent more than a month in hospital with a brain injury.
Dr Aoife Abbey, told the story of Pat in her new book ‘Seven Signs of Life’, in which she said doctors feel ‘as happy as anybody else’ when patients survive against the odds
‘It is no secret doctors aren’t always right when we give a prognosis,’ Dr Abbey revealed in an excerpt in Times 2 today.
‘But when we’re wrong I believe we are as happy as anybody else.
‘Most intensive-care doctors I meet tell me that they would rather give realistic odds, even if they are pessimistic, and risk that patient being in the minority who “make it”, than be responsible for somebody’s false hope.’
Pat, a bricklayer, husband and father of adult children, had been in intensive care for 40 days, during which time his condition deteriorated.
Medics struggled to help him breathe, could not wean him off sedatives, and couldn’t wake him up.
His condition became so bad staff on the ward couldn’t imagine him ever being sent home, Dr Abbey said.
They gathered the family and warned them it was likely they would never be able to restore Pat – whose age and surname aren’t revealed – to consciousness.
The next day, after being told her husband was probably not ‘salvageable’, Pat’s wife Linda was sitting with him and called Dr Abbey over to the bedside.
‘He’s different today,’ Linda said.
Dr Abbey explained her expectations were low because differences family and friends think they are seeing are not medically significant.
But looking down at her patient lying still and breathing through a ventilator, she saw Pat’s eyes were open and looking at his wife and daughter.
Admitting she had never seen his eyes open, Dr Abbey explained how she pushed down excitement at this improvement and went to tell a colleague.
She wrote: ‘I am hopeful, I can feel it welling up inside me. The vision of those quietly screaming eyes. I can feel the rush of pleasure from knowing that this is why intensive care exists, and maybe we can help. I hope, I hope, I hope.
‘But to expose my own human tendency at this stage would be to see it magnified tenfold in Linda’s eyes… So when I stand with Linda, I push my hope down.’
Dr Abbey said she waited for more evidence before admitting her hope to Linda and the family, to avoid giving them false hope.
Dr Abbey is training to be an intensive care specialist at at University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust (pictured, University Hospital Coventry)
Two weeks later, Pat could sit on the edge of his bed without being hooked up to a ventilator and listen to Frank Sinatra.
A month after his eyes opened he could sit out in an armchair, ‘surveying his kingdom’, Dr Abbey wrote, admitting his every improvement made her happy.
She explained that doctors give poor survival odds when they have no choice and have to work with the facts they have.
And she spoke of the joy she feels every time a patient given a one per cent chance of survival survives.
‘The one per cent makes me get out of bed in the morning. The one per cent is why I can do this job,’ she added.
Aoife Abbey’s ‘Seven Signs of Life’ is published by Vintage and will be available from February 7.