An excerpt from Beyond the White Coat: A Novel.
Before I ever ran toward a code, I ran away from one.
I was a fourth-year medical student at U.C. San Diego shadowing in the trauma bay when a man arrived from a freeway accident, young, beautiful, golden even in blood. They called for compressions. I stood back, pressed against the wall, my hands gripping my clipboard like it might protect me from the sound of ribs cracking under desperate palms. “Switch out!” someone shouted. I didn’t move. Couldn’t.
I remember the resident’s voice slicing through the chaos: “You want to be a doctor? Then touch the dying.” I stepped forward.
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My hands landed on the man’s chest. It felt indecent, intrusive, sacred. The body wasn’t an object; it was a plea.
I pressed down. “Harder!” the resident barked. I pressed harder. His sternum gave.
The monitor spiked. A brief rhythm fluttered to life, then vanished. We called time. My arms shook as if I’d wrestled with God and lost.
Later, in the stairwell, the resident found me sitting on the steps, stethoscope dangling like an unclaimed medal. “You didn’t fail,” he said. “You witnessed.” “Witnessed what?” He thought for a moment. “The distance between control and surrender. It’s smaller than you think.”
That night, I drove home past the freeway where they’d pulled that man from the wreckage. Traffic crawled, red taillights smearing into wet streaks, like heartbeats that kept going without him.
When I sprint down hospital corridors now, answering codes, I still hear that voice behind me: “You want to be a doctor? Then touch the dying.”
And I do, because sometimes, touching the dying is the only way to remind both of us we are still alive.
Afshine Emrani is a cardiologist.
