Listening
It was an overcast Saturday as I made my way down the hall, examining one elderly patient after another at our in-patient hospice unit. Mr. G was alone, his room dark. He didn’t respond to my voice. I wasn’t surprised: his nurse had told me he was close to death and appeared comfortable.
I reached for his wrist to feel his pulse with one hand while I placed my stethoscope at the bottom of his sternum. No radial pulse. But the sound of his heart was remarkable: a thrumming, a quivering, a vibration, a sound I’d never heard before but instinctively recognized. He was in ventricular fibrillation, his heart was flailing.
