a Junkie's remorse

I’ve read a story where a doctor lets his patient die by negligence (not a fan of allusions; so I’ll just leave this here). It reminded me of a friend I had (I still do). He’s a fellow intern at my college, my roommate and he has killed a patient already.

As I write this, he has just left to the ward after having his fourth of vodka. I’m not being judgmental or critical (and I beg you to be the same) but the last thing people want is a drunk guy handling their morphine.

His first resuscitation was a failure, by the way. But that’s not what I’m talking about because a patient that needs cardiopulmonary resuscitation is already dead, technically.

Anyhow. On his fourth day of Intensive Care Unit posting, he had just taken leave for the changing room at 4 am in the morning when the nurse banged at the door to inform that a patient had just went into respiratory distress. He hurried to the patient’s bedside, but on reaching, he had no idea what to do next. The sleepy old nurse had too little to offer. He picked a needle from the tray, assuming the patient had his both lungs collapsed, and stuck it in his thorax. It is still a mystery how he managed to hit the patient’s stomach instead of his lungs and needless to say the patient died shortly.

On that fateful early morning, I was grinding up some pills in my room to snort later on. That was when he entered the room exasperated, dark faced, perspiring. Then he said, “I just killed a man, where’s my vodka?”

PS: In the aforementioned story, the doctor jumps off a building after letting his patient die.