When love is not the best medicine

Seeing someone spurting blood is instinctively unnerving. When that person is a loved one, it’s more like a kick to the marbles. While on a recent locum holiday, my wife and I were parked at the base of Mt Cook, squabbling over something trivial, when she managed to pull a large metal bar, the campervan table support, into her forehead. Blood exploded over the interior of the campervan. I looked at her, eyes wide with the serenity of shock (the emotional type, not a medical observation). At that moment, time was slowed by pulses of thought. I marvelled at myself grabbing for a tea towel applying pressure to the wound and lying her down. I marvelled not at the action performed, but the kaleidoscope of scenarios and questions simultaneously projected onto my cortex, when a sizeable part of me wanted to curl up and pretend it didn’t happen. What was the damage? Was this really happening? What would I tell her Mum?
The white squares of the tea towel blended into red in the time it took her to lean back. I was hit by the guilt of my unpreparedness. We weren’t climbing a mountain or clinging to a rock face, but we were four hours from any real medical base  that I could think of and I had given up on medical kits pre medical school.
 
In the emergency department, unless you make a major mistake with a scalpel, you don’t see that initial gush of blood. Usually, once we get around to seeing the patient after they have filled in the forms, you peer at a rather unimpressive flap of skin, which doesn’t fit the teeth sucking noise or the wincing that the person performs. Four hours later, I watched the slightly bored and disbelieving face of the treating medic, as he assessed the slightly diminutive cut. I though of my working ‘Doctor face’, my ‘Doctor voice’, or worse, the ‘Doctor jokes’ that seep out like flatus, that patients have to tolerate. For my wife, about ten seconds was spent on the story and the doctor and I spent one hour talking about everything else. I left happy, with an offer of future employment. My wife left concussed and unsure. Don’t get me wrong, the staff were great and performed their job perfectly. Sometimes, it just doesn’t pay to be the wife of a doctor.