...23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30.

Rhythm check.

Asystole.

Give adrenaline.

Compressions.

...27, 28, 29, 30.

Rhythm check.

Pulseless electrical activity.

Resume compressions.

...27, 28, 29, 30.

Rhythm check.

Asystole.

Failed resuscitation.

Sometimes, there is nothing you can do. Sometimes it's too late. All the chemistry is there, but something isn't connecting. The system fails.

I left my home early on a Saturday morning, for call. When I did, I left behind the scattered shatters of a relationship that failed.

In the resuscitation, the shards cut through my fingers, through my chest, and I bled all the way to work.

I had to plaster on a mask. It's easier to do behind an actual mask, then one only has to sheild the eyes. Your mouth can stay slack with the horror of your bloodshed.

I have never prayed to be busy, to be overwhelmed into brain numbness. But that day I did. I prayed.

I wanted to hear 'code blue' so I'd have somewhere to run to, someone's else's chest to beat, someone else's heart to save. Other pain. Someone else's pain.

Give me a pile of files so high, I'd be in shadow behind it. Let the panic come. Work panic. So I wouldn't think about going home to an empty house in sunbeams of dust and silence. Emptiness.

Smother my pain, I begged.

On the way into the wards, I bumped into Cameron. He didn't notice my face, but I noticed his: grey and sloping downwards.

"Was it bad?" He'd been on the night before.

"It was bad."

"What happened?"

"I missed an aspiration pneumonia. The head of department just dropped me from a dizzy height." He sighed and rubbed his eyes. "I'm just so tired of not feeling good enough."

The wind rattled the windows, cold seeped up from the floor through my shoes. It was winter and I had never felt colder.

The sisters  in the wards warned me that some patients were circling the drain: one had been brought by his family, who had given him a little something to make him more manageable, and now he could barely breath. One was an older lady with pneumonia, already bed bound, now septic.

But when they did call me it was for a patient I knew, a patient who I was going to discharge in the following week. She was an old lady who'd had a stroke and then an infection, and suddenly she was dead. She was fine one moment, smiling at me and babbling words I didn't fully understand. Then I walked into the room, convinced the sisters were wrong, and there she was in the bed, with unseeing eyes, still warm.

I knew there was a lot of work to get to, a lot of work and people to deal with. But I had to stand a moment behind the clinical green hospital curtains and hold her hand. She smiled at me just that morning. I watched her come back from almost comatose. I didn't understand what went wrong?

What went wrong?

I listened to her chest, I hoped for sounds, I knew they wouldn't be there. The life was gone. I sat and wrote the notes that I am required to write. I filled in  the forms. A tear formed in the corner of my eye, but I brushed it away so I could face other pain, instead of thinking about endings. Demise, death, the end of something beautiful.

Four more people passed on that night. I didn't know any of their families, but I had to watch one of their loved ones race down a corridor just to find their family member already gone, and then make a phone call to family who told me they would not be coming, to go ahead and send the body to the morgue. I watched love and indifference sway unpredictably before me like tides, and try not to let them sweep me away.

I tried not to let my pain cloud they way I treated other people. I tried to leave it at the door.

I thought it might be nice to sit for a few moments, feel the pain wash over me, the realization of death and loss. Once the wave had crashed into me, it could pass. I would churn through the water, but then I would slowly turn the right way uo, and surface.

But my phone wouldn't stop ringing. More drips to re-site, more patients to see, more families to phone.

So I go on, with blurry eyes, I keep my head above the waves and I float, without any time to really surface.