Emotional Intelligence

By any reasonable standard, no doctor would like to be called back to the hospital in the middle of the night. But some of them can't be judged by any reasonable standard.

Last night I went to see a 92-year-old woman who has been bleeding from the ulcer in her digestive tract. My guess was that I might have to ask someone to perform an upper endoscopy procedure to help that anaemic patient. Probably it's the most helpful means to control bleeding through a flexible tube going all the way from the mouth to the first part of the small intestine. But that's quite impossible – her doctors have tried this way for three times within one week but to no avail. Strictly, however, she wasn't fit enough for us to take her to the operating room.

I hesitated for a moment, and then phoned up the radiologist team. They had already attempted more than once to put a tube into her blood vessel in the leg and thread it up to block the bleeding artery near the stomach. My classmate radiologist barely flinched when I told him the story. "Prepare her for the third angiography," my classmate told me, "and I'll be back within an hour."

To give you a sense of what it's like for a radiologist to perform the angiography, imagine yourself wearing a sturdy apron made of lead (instead of cloth) and standing for an hour in front of a monitor. But wait: the monitor isn't as colourful as the Wii video games; it is a maze of black-and-white pictures where the radiologist navigates with the wires. So how can the radiologist go without getting lost in the maze? Hardly. They get lost as often as a puppeteer gets his strings entangled. Skill isn't enough. A radiologist can lose his way during the angiography but cannot lose his temper. That's the easiest to lose and the hardest to survive without. When my classmate found his way to the target artery, I was amazed to find that he couldn't go further because of the machine breakdown. More amazing still: he was perfectly composed to finish the task with his bare hands instead of the machine.

I was amazed. Even now.