Working at the fringes of existence
Seven Signs Of Life: Stories From An Intensive Care Doctor Aoife Abbey Vintage €14 ★★★★★
Aoife Abbey is honest enough to tell us about all the times she has messed up as a doctor in intensive care. On one occasion, when still quite junior, she misread a crucial Xray, which resulted in a patient losing his life a day earlier than he might otherwise have done. Another time, distraught relatives accused her of being a ‘murderer’, as if she were personally responsible for inventing both the concept and mechanics of death. Just as bad, from Abbey’s point of view, is the recollection of all those moments when tiredness has made her snappy with careless colleagues who page her in the middle of the night to attend an ‘emergency’ that turns out to be entirely routine. All these incidents, heartbreaking, terrifying, or merely frustrating, are crammed into this brilliant, compelling account of what it is like to spend your days caring for patients ‘on the fringe of existence’. There are few happy endings here. Some patients do get a bit better and are discharged, but often they are back again within months, challenged by bodies that are irreversibly damaged by cancer or heart disease.
Yet Seven Signs Of Life is no misery memoir by the doctor from Dublin. To the contrary, it is a hugely life-affirming book. In between the many grim situations encountered on a daily basis, Abbey shows us moments of both joy and deep emotional connection. She emerges from a tricky conversation with a patient’s family to find a colleague waiting silently for her with a cup of coffee and a piece of cake. An elderly woman with dementia stops screaming for long enough to explain, suddenly sane, that ‘I feel lonely’. And then, of course, there are the occasional miraculous transformations – those broken, dying bodies that are shocked and transplanted back to life against all the odds.
As Abbey returns after yet another allnighter to her empty home – she makes no mention of a partner – she savours these moments as evidence that she is in ‘exactly the right place’.