It’s March 2nd and my first day back home after spending 5 days in hospital has come to an end. I have thoroughly enjoyed being wrapped up in a blanket watching ‘The Night Manager’ and ‘The People vs OJ Simpson: American Crime Story.’ However, I’m not the same person I was when I went in to hospital.

Last Friday night, I was left feeling a little on edge after experiencing discomfort due to ongoing stomach pains. Of course, stomach pains are nothing out of the ordinary for me but they usually went away after an hour or so and even after taking medication, I was still suffering. Things reached a peak at around 11pm on Friday night; I was doubled over in pain, unable to breathe without feeling a stabbing pain rippling through my upper abdomen. Not cute. By 2.30am the following morning, I was hooked up to an IV line. Over the course of the next 5 days, I was transferred from a&e to the surgical assessment unit, to the day surgery unit. But that isn’t the point of this post.

Whilst in the day surgery unit, I came across many patients being admitted and transferred and I guess I should’ve been prepared for some sticky situations – after all, this was a surgical unit. On Monday night, a young patient was admitted to the bed next to me after undergoing surgery. It was clear that something hadn’t gone too great with the operation because she was screaming in agony and bleeding out. This was at roughly 10pm so visiting times were over and the rest of us in the bay were alone and it was pretty quite, with patients either zonked out on morphine or trying their best to sleep. Her parents were with her to ensure she settled in okay and was recovering from the operation, when things took a sudden turn for the worse. I heard the patient’s mother call the nurses frantically, telling them her daughter was feeling light-headed. Within two minutes, the patient had gone into cardiac arrest from bleeding out.

The next 20 minutes were a blur of surgeons, anaesthetists and nurses running around, giving her oxygen and trying to stop the bleeding. With no theatres free to perform emergency surgery, they were forced to stop the bleeding there and then in order to save her life. Her parents were hysterical with fear and surgeons were shouting about the lack of blood bags available to them – it was terrifying. I guess I forgot that in hospitals, things do go wrong and situations like this do occur. It’s not common but it does happen and in the moment, everything just fell away. The pain I was experiencing, the sickness, all the symptoms just fell away because all I was thinking of was how young this girl was next to me and how numb I felt.

I don’t know if they managed to save her. She didn’t come back the following day, and neither the nurses nor other members of staff had any clue as to what happened in that operating theatre. Situations like this put everything into perspective; life is too unpredictable and we ought to make the most of the good health we have. What is life if we don’t have our health? Right now, I can’t get those 20 minutes out of my head. I’m not sure if I will forget the panic in her parents’ voices, the panic in the surgeons’ voices and the sound of the blood pressure monitor dropping. It’s a horrific reminder of the fact that we’re only on this planet for a limited amount of time and we ought to make the most of every single second; by being good within ourselves and towards others. Whether you believe in God and His power to guide you or not, it’s important to have a pure heart as that alone makes us immortal.

“Is not He Who listens to the distressed soul when it calls on Him, and remove its suffering, and makes you inheritors of the earth?…” [Surah al-Naml 27:62] 

A x