A jet of blood spurted from a wound in his right ventricle, where the assailant’s knife had penetrated. With the pressure of the clot on his heart relieved, his pulse returned, and oxygen-rich blood again surged throughout his body. We incised it and scooped out the clot, then delivered his heart into the open air. The sac surrounding his heart was tense as a balloon, taut with blood. After a few swipes of the scalpel and the crank of a retractor, we were peering into a space never intended for worldly exposure. Unlike scheduled, routine surgeries in the operating room, this procedure was a frenzied, last-ditch effort to save a life. The emergency medicine team leapt forward and started CPR, while my resident and I splashed antiseptic and opened the boy’s chest. Regardless of the truth claims you espouse, instinct returns you to your origins, and you pray: Oh please, no God. When you feel none, your mind goes into overdrive. You clamber frantically at the neck, then at the thigh, in search of the familiar thud of a pulse. The words pitch dread into the stomach like a leaden weight. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.”Īny scenario that includes the cry “I don’t feel a pulse” is a Romans 1 moment. In verses 19–20, Paul writes, “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Some snapshots in life are Romans 1 moments. We unlocked the stretcher to wheel him out of the trauma bay.
I called the operating room to alert them that we were coming. If we didn’t act quickly, cardiac arrest would follow. Their thin walls collapsed with each beat like two palms clapping.
My resident performed a quick ultrasound, and the dancing images confirmed that a clot compressed the chambers of his heart. Removal of his shirt revealed a single wound beneath his left nipple, a stream of blood threading down his torso. My second was that he looked like he was dying. My first thought when paramedics wheeled him into the trauma bay was that he was just a kid.
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