Stephen Westaby, Snapchat Nonsense

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The Knife’s Edge – The Heart and Mind of a Cardiac Surgeon - Stephen Westaby.

The Reader

Alfred Emile Leopold Joseph Victor Stevens (1823-1906)

Photo Credit: The Fitzwilliam Museum [CC BY-NC-ND]

Stephen Westaby, as a trainee at Cambridge, got the nickname “Jaws” because of the speed with which he could amputate a limb.

…In the first volume of his memoirs Fragile Lives he describes being plucked from the pub to assist in repairing an aorta torn in a road traffic accident.

“The problem wasn’t so much the amount of alcohol – we were used to that – more the volume of urine to pass during a four hour operation…There was no way I could maintain concentration with a bursting bladder, but I didn’t want to lose face by asking to leave, like a whimpering schoolboy with his hand up in class.”

Westaby used rubber tubing as an improvised catheter, fed it down into his surgical boot and coughed to disguise the squelching. The patient survived.

“We were adrenaline junkies living on a continuous high, craving action. From bleeding patients to cardiac arrests. From theatre to intensive care. From pub to party. Sleep deprivation underpins the psychology of the surgical mind – immunity to stress, an ability to take risks, the loss of empathy. Bit by bit I was joining that exclusive club.”

In ‘The Knife’s Edge’ …while working in an emergency room in Harlem, he went to the rescue of a young nurse who had tried to confiscate contaminated syringes from a drug-crazed addict who then went berserk with a flick knife and tried to kill her.

Westaby performed “a full-on rugby tackle sending the two of us sailing over the chairs in the waiting room. The addicts knife sliced open the thumb of my right hand and blood spattered in streaks over my pristine white intern’s vest. One of the guards hit my combatant over the head with a riot stick and he ended up in neuro-surgery. The grateful chief nurse stitched my wounds, then I went to watch the burr holes being drilled in the lad’s skull.”

…His fears for the future of surgical training and the wider NHS are well articulated, not least in recounting the death of his mother. She was 92, had dementia and severe Parkinson’s and was clearly dying.

“We all wanted her to be comfortable and I knew how to achieve that. When my grandfather was dying from heart failure, his kindly GP came to the house to dispense morphine, which helped him on his way. As a junior doctor in the 1970s, I did the same for many desperate patients. It is what compassionate doctors do: it is end-of-life care and common decency.”

Instead he had to call 111 and begin “a dialogue of incomprehensible stupidity” with the “call-handler read[ing] out her lines and a barrage of wholly inappropriate questions. I think to myself: I am a doctor. I know what the patient needs.” But he couldn’t get it. “It seemed a fitting testament to a broken NHS. It made no difference that our family was full of doctors. No one was there to help.”

(Dr Phil Hammond, The Times, 6.4.2019)

End of life care and common decency must surely be the responsibility of the GP if the patient is at home? Does all this interference with GPs hark back to Dr Harold Shipman?

Snapchat

A recent report by Murphy Research suggests Snapchat makes 95 percent of its users feel happy.

Who commissioned the research? Snapchat.