Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery by Henry Marsh Page A

said, dropping the wet and slippery phone as I tried to pull it out of my tracksuit and answer the call.
    ‘James here. I can’t stop the oozing,’ a voice said from the muddy ground.
    ‘What’s the problem?’ I asked, once I had managed to pick the phone up.
    ‘I’ve taken the clot out and put a drain in but the cavity is oozing a lot.’
    ‘Not to worry. Line it with Surgicel, pack it and take a break. Go and have a cup of tea. Tea is the best haemostatic agent! I’ll look by in thirty minutes or so.’
    So I finished my run, had a shower, and made the short journey back to the hospital, but in my car, because of the rain. It was dark by now, with a strong wind, and there had been heavy snowfalls in the north, even though it was already April. I parked my car in the scruffy delivery bay by the hospital basement. Although I am not supposed to park there, it does not seem to matter at night and it means that I can get up to the theatres more quickly than from one of the official car parks which are further away.
    I put my head past the doors of the theatre. James was standing at the end of the operating table, holding the patient’s head in his hands as he wound a bandage around it. The front of his gown was smeared with blood and there was a large pool of dark red blood at his feet. The operation was clearly finished.
    ‘All well?’ I asked.
    ‘Yes. It’s fine,’ he replied. ‘But it took quite a while.’
    ‘Did you go and have a cup of tea to help stop the bleeding?’
    ‘Well, no, not tea,’ he said, pointing to a plastic bottle of Coca-Cola on one of the worktops behind him.
    ‘Well, no wonder the haemostasis took so long!’ I said with mock disapproval and all the team laughed, happy that the case was over and that they could now go home. I went briefly to check on the tumour patient who was now on the ITU for the night as a matter of routine.
    The ITU had had a busy week and there were ten patients in the large and brightly-lit warehouse of a room, all but one of them unconscious, lying on their backs and attached to a forest of machinery with flashing lights and digital read-outs the colour of rubies and emeralds. Each patient has their own nurse, and in the middle of the room there is a large desk with computer monitors and many members of staff talking on the phone or working on the computers or snatching a plastic cup of tea in between carrying out the constant tasks that are needed in intensive care.
    The one patient who was not unconscious was my brain tumour case, who was sitting upright in bed, still looking red-faced, but wide awake.
    ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked.
    ‘Fine,’ he replied with a tired smile.
    ‘Well done!’ I replied, as I think patients need to be congratulated for their surviving just as much as the surgeons should be congratulated for doing their job well.
    ‘It’s a bit of a war zone here, I’m afraid,’ I said to him, gesticulating to the depersonalized forms of the other patients and all the technology and busy staff around us. Few – if any – of these patients would survive or emerge unscathed from whatever it was that had damaged their brains.
    ‘I’m afraid you won’t get much sleep tonight.’
    He nodded in reply, and I went downstairs to the basement in a contented frame of mind.
    I found my car with a large notice stuck to the windscreen.
    ‘You have been clamped,’ the notice said, and there was a long list beneath this accusing me of negligence and disrespect and so on and so forth, and telling me to report to the Security Office to pay a large fine.
    ‘I really can’t take this anymore!’ I burst out in rage and despair, shouting at the concrete pillars around me but when I furiously marched round my car, to my surprise I found that none of the wheels had been clamped and then, when I came round to the notice again, I noticed that added in ballpoint to the notice were the words ‘Next time’ with two large exclamation marks.
    I drove