Dr Izaak Lim has never forgotten the first death he witnessed very early on in his medical career.
“I was stunned. I couldn’t walk anywhere I couldn’t really talk to anyone,” Dr Lim says.
He says he was absolutely floored by the magnitude of the situation and shocked that the hospital continued to buzz around him.
“I thought to myself ‘what an Earth-shattering moment’,” he says.
“I don’t know what I expected but I felt like a bell should have tolled or we should have observed a moment’s silence.
“I just felt that this moment deserved some recognition. A man had just died.”
Dr Lim says he was painfully aware that for that man’s family, the world stopped that day.
But in the emergency department business continued as usual. There was a young woman in the room next door who had a ruptured ectopic pregnancy, which is considered a true surgical emergency. The waiting room was full of people and the ambulances were ramping up outside.
‘I could hear the ribs cracking.’
Dr Lim’s patient that day was a 48-year-old man with no medical history who was sitting at home on the couch watching TV when he clutched his chest and fell to the ground.
Forty-five minutes later he was in hospital and Dr Lim was pounding his chest.
“What they don’t teach you in medical school is the sensory aspect of performing CPR on a real person,” Dr Lim says.
“As I was trying to keep this man alive, by squeezing his heart up against his spine, I could feel the ribs cracking underneath the heel of my hand.