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I’m going to interrupt my progressive catching-up to report a seriously incredible, I’m-really-going-to-be-a-doctor experience.

I was doing a shift in the Pediatric ER the other night, seeing a lot of lacerations and a cute little girl whose mom was afraid she had swallowed a piece of plastic, when a resident told me that 3 traumas from a car accident were en route and suggested I go over to the Critical Care ER to watch. I ran into another medical student there, and together we stood and watched in awe as a stretcher came barreling in. The patient was a young man, lying there naked and intubated as doctors and nurses swarmed around doing CPR, inserting IVs, and giving medications. He had suffered a traumatic brain injury, though, and ultimately the resuscitation attempts were unsuccessful.

As I walked away realizing that I had just witnessed my first death, we went to a nearby room where another team was working on a young girl. A resident turned to us and said, “Med students, if you’d like to do compressions, now would be a good time to gown and glove.” We scrambled to grab gloves and plastic gowns amid the chaos, then stood in line behind the guy doing chest compressions.

Chest compressions are not easy; it requires some force to push someone’s chest down far enough to force the heart to pump blood. A person can only do them effectively for so long before tiring.

When I moved into position to relieve the person before me, I stepped up onto a little stool wondering, How is this going to feel on a real body? The answer is that the dummies used in CPR classes provide an eerily good approximation of how hard you must push. I pumped from my shoulders, bending at the waist to put my whole upper body into the effort. Inches from my fingers, someone had cut between the ribs and was suturing a chest tube into place. To my right, someone worked the bag to force air through a tube into her lungs. There was blood everywhere. I realized that I was the only one not wearing scrubs, since I had worked in the clinic that day. I’m wearing Ann Taylor. At a trauma code.

When I tired, someone else took over and I stepped aside to watch. Eventually they called this one, too; she could not be saved. It was anticlimactic; as everyone stopped what they were doing, stripped off their gowns and gloves, and walked away, my mind screamed, But she’s so young! Shouldn’t we keep trying? She’s young! But of course, that had nothing to do with it. You don’t try harder based on someone’s age, or give up sooner because of it. They had done their best – we had done our best – and despite that, her heart would not beat on its own.

The accident occurred not far from where we live. It has been in the papers, and on the way home from the gym today we saw the flowers people have stuck in a fence right near the site. I don’t know if I’m completely over it or if it hasn’t actually hit me yet, but the whole thing doesn’t seem real, that that was an actual person under my hands, who was alive last week, who is now gone.