No Significant Medical History by Caleb He, M2
One of the first things they taught us as matriculating M1s, even before our medical school training officially began, was how to perform CPR. Cadaver lab was on the horizon, but for now we learned from an armless, legless mannequin that was so far removed from any semblance of an actual human being that it was at times hard to take seriously. Breaking the ice, we would occasionally burst out in laughter as we practiced our compressions, but the instructor was anything but casual about what he was teaching us.
In the same room where we would later attend lectures, he stressed the importance of not merely doing CPR, but doing high-quality compressions. I, like probably most people who’ ve only seen resuscitation previously in TV dramas, was shocked by how deep the compressions need to go – 2 to 2.4 inches deep into the chest – indicated on the mannequins by a click that told us we were pushing hard enough. I remembered tiring out after one minute of compressions. There is training on a mannequin torso, and then there is what happens in real life. It never once crossed my mind that a year later would be the first time I would do it on a real person: my father.
It was the last Sunday of November, the end of Thanksgiving break, 2025. What occupied my mind was that the semester final exams were in two weeks, and I needed to study. My two nieces were getting ready for church, and my mother told me to go rouse my father before I left for Louisville. He slept in his own room and often slept late. I walked up the stairs to his door and opened it.
Nothing prepared me for the longest minutes of my life. There were many things that I, as a 23-year-old medical student,
was not prepared at all to do. I was not prepared to physically carry my distraught, wailing mother out of the room and away from the scene. Nothing would’ ve prepared me to emotionally deal with the guttural noises that came out of my mother, sounds that only afterwards I registered as screaming, screaming that punctuated those agonizing, glacial minutes while the ambulance siren approached all too slowly in the distance. They told us that CPR was exhausting. Nothing prepared me for the complete loss of sensation in my arms and hands as I continued to do compressions, nor the numbness that seemed to sever my mind from my body. Nothing could’ ve prepared me for the look on my father’ s face when I turned him over, the type of face I had already seen so many times before in gross anatomy.
Nothing could’ ve prepared me to translate for the coroner into Mandarin as she explained to my mother, who was rocking back and forth in a fetal position, that the reddish-purple color on my father’ s chest did not mean he was still alive, but rather the result of livor mortis, gravity causing blood to pool in the skin when the heart no longer beats. No first-year lecture taught me how to get down on one knee and tell my nieces, 4 and 9 years old, that their grandfather who hugged them the night before is not coming back. I was caught off-guard by the muddy boot prints of a dozen sheriffs, paramedics and firefighters on the wooden floor of our living room. No simulation in the world would’ ve prepared me for how unceremonious my father’ s final departure out the front door was: in a zippered black bag, hoisted by two scowling, heavyset men onto a gurney. After the ambulance and squad cars pulled out of the driveway, nothing could’ ve prepared me for the stifling silence that seemed to engulf the entire house like an avalanche.
I wasn’ t unprepared to physically do the steps of CPR. Just the
26 LOUISVILLE MEDICINE