Near Death

by Andrew Cochrane

He checked for a pulse. Nothing. He moved his fingers around a little. Nothing. A little further up. Nothing. A little further down. Nothing. A little further to the left.

He put his face down in front of Bobby’s, tilting his head to the side. There was no light breath tickling his cheek. He wasn’t breathing, his heart wasn’t beating.

Something had to be done. If this man was going to carry on living, then something drastic had to be done.

Tom kicked a load of empty beer bottles out the way and started to perform CPR even though the only CPR he had ever seen administered was on television programmes like ER and Casualty. He placed both hands together over Bobby’s chest and began the bouncing motion that seemed second nature to all doctors on hospital shows.

One two three four one two three four he was counting like this before realising he had to call an ambulance. He couldn’t be doing this all night, not even sure if it was being done right.

‘Hi yeah I need an ambulance to number 42 Hamilton Drive. My friend’s stopped breathing I think he had a heart attack.’

The operator spoke and Tom listened.

‘Alright,’ said Tom. ‘Alright, yeah, I already did that. He’s not breathing, and there’s no pulse.’

He listened again.

‘Yeah I think so,’ he said. He pressed a button on the phone and placed it down on the telephone table.

‘Alright, can you hear me?’ said the operator, her voice coming out of the loudspeaker.

‘Yeah, sure, just tell me what to do.’

‘First of all you need to make sure nothing’s obstructing his airways. You need to open his mouth and check if he has anything stuck in his throat, can you do that?’

‘Yeah,’ he said from his position on the floor. He already had a hand on Bobby’s chin, pulling it back and looking inside. ‘Nothing there.’

‘Okay. Now I’m gonna talk you through Cardio-Pulmonary Resuscitation. CPR.’

‘Yeah, I know what that is. But you’ll have to tell me exactly what to do.’

‘Place the heel of one of your hands in the centre of his chest.’

‘Okay.’

‘Place your other hand on top and link your fingers together.’

‘Okay.’

‘Have you done that?’

‘Yes, okay, what next?’

‘Keep your arms straight and your fingers off the chest, okay, and press down four to five centimetres and then release the pressure. You do this 30 times in twenty seconds.’

‘Okay I’m doing it.’

‘Now when you’ve done thirty of those you have to pinch the casualty’s nose closed, seal your lips around his mouth and blow two breaths so that his chest rises.’

He did this.

‘Are you doing it?’

‘Yes I’m doing it, what next?’

‘Repeat the process again. 30 chest compressions and two breaths, okay? The ambulance is on the way, it’s almost there, and you’re doing fine. Keep doing that until they get there.’

There was a pause.

‘Is he breathing normally?’

‘No I don’t think so.’

‘Keep doing it then.’

Another pause from the operator.

Tom said, ‘The ambulance is here. I can here the sirens.’

‘Okay go and let them in when they get there.’

He carried on with trying to get Bobby to breathe until he heard the sirens right outside. He ran to the door and opened it. The paramedics were rushing in.

‘Are they there?’ They had all come into the living room now and Tom went over to the phone.

He was saying to them ‘I was doing CPR but he’s still not breathing right.’

‘Are they there?’ the operator said.

‘Yes they’re here.’

‘Alright I’ll let you go then.’

‘Okay, thank you.’

‘That’s alright you did wonderfully.’

‘Okay bye.’

‘Bye bye.’

He hung up. The paramedics were performing CPR. Well one of them was. The other had gone out and was wheeling in a stretcher, folding the straps back so that the body could be put in.

The paramedics switched over with CPR duties, and eventually one of them said, ‘I’ve established a regular breathing rhythm. We need to get him to the hospital.’

The legs of the stretcher had been folded down so it was flat on the floor beside Bobby. They hoisted him on quickly, strapped him in and lifted the legs so that it could be wheeled out.

Tom grabbed the key and followed them out, locking the house behind him. He got in the ambulance after the stretcher and one of the paramedics.

***

‘Do you believe dreams have meaning?’ he said.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Because I’ve heard things about people talking languages they’ve never learnt or being in geographical locations they’ve never been while they’re dreaming.’

‘So?’

‘Well it just interests me, thinking that we may know things we don’t think we know. And that maybe dreams are trying to tell us things about ourselves.’

‘Or that they’re cataloguing memory?’

‘Right.’

‘Or that they’re chemical reactions going on in the brain, the same as the light at the end of the tunnel that people see when they have a near-death experience?’

‘You see,’ said Tom. ‘There are so many different theories I just wondered what you believe in.’

‘I don’t believe in anything. There are loads of theories and hypotheses, but I don’t feel like I know enough to make a judgement. I’m no expert.’

‘Right, neither am I. But you must have a theory yourself, or a belief.’

‘Neuroscience has a good point.’

‘The chemical reactions.’

‘Yeah.’

‘But you don’t think there could be something more?’

‘More what?’

‘Just something more to it than chemical reactions.’

‘Not really, I don’t know. You said about people speaking a different language. Maybe they absorbed that language from listening to somebody speak it and then their brains just regurgitate that in the dream.’

‘But it could be something innate.’

‘How could it be? Language isn’t innate. It isn’t there when you’re born, you learn it.’

‘Right.’

‘Maybe it’s just a higher form of imagination,’ said Bobby.

‘Right, but when these people look up what they were speaking in their dreams, they find out that they were actually speaking real words in whatever language it was. It wasn’t just bullshit.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘No seriously. Apparently it happens quite regularly.’

‘Well like I said, they absorbed it or something. Does what they say ever make sense or is it just a bunch of disconnected words?’

‘I dunno.’

‘Well it probably doesn’t matter. Either they absorb individual words or they absorb whole sentences and then just basically play it back when they’re asleep. So it has no relevance to anything. Just what they heard being said once.’

Bobby stood to get another beer. He disappeared into the kitchen.

‘What made you think of this now?’ he said, still in the kitchen.

‘I dunno. It’s just been in my head the past few days is all. I’ve just been wondering about it. Think I might do some research on it or something. At the library.’

Bobby came back through holding two bottles of beer at the neck. He was a big fella, and he sat down heavily on the sofa. He reached for the bottle opener on the coffee table and opened the bottles, handing one to Tom.

‘Tom, you are full of useless enquiry. Why don’t you just give it a rest?’

‘Well I don’t see why it’s useless really. It applies to everybody, after all. Everybody dreams. We should know about these things.’

‘Sure,’ he said. He reached for the remote and put the volume up on the football game. ‘Can we watch now? S’what I came over to do.’

They watched for awhile, sipping beer occasionally.

Then Tom said, ‘What you said about near-death experience, about the white light at the end of the tunnel...’

‘Yeah?’

‘Do you believe that, that it’s just a load of chemical reactions in the brain?’

Bobby said, ‘I guess so. What else can it be? There ain’t no God, and there ain’t no heaven.’

***

In the ambulance, Tom said, ‘Is he gonna be okay, doc?’ He had to shout to be heard over the sirens.

The paramedic was holding an oxygen mask to Bobby’s face.

‘Fraid to say I don’t know. His breathing’s stable at the moment, and looks like he’s out of the rough neck of the woods. But he’s still unconscious and there’s no way to tell whether he’ll have another attack. His heart’s very fragile at the moment.’

Tom watched Bobby bounce with the motion of the ambulance.

***

‘Bobby, if you can hear me, it’s time to wake up, big guy.’

Bobby was hooked up to machines, wires tangled all over the place, going up his nose, attached to his chest with little circular pads, going into the back of his hand.

‘It’s time to wake up.’

No reaction. Tom sat in a chair with wooden arms beside the bed, waiting to see if Bobby’s eyes would flicker open.

‘Doc says it’s all down to you now, that you gotta wake up on your own, says you might slip into a coma or something. He says if you’re healthy and strong you should be okay, you can fight it.’

His friend was just laying there, heart-rate pretty low in the forties, the monitor bleeping away to a rhythm, thin line snaking across the screen and doing its little dance in the middle.

He sat back and crossed a leg over a thigh.

‘Doc was asking all kinds of questions like if you drink a lot or eat a lot of red meat. His name is Wainwright, Dr Wainwright. I think.’

He was talking because he didn’t like the silence of hospital rooms, the silence and the constant beep beep beep of the heart monitor.

***

They were watching the game, not really getting into it like they normally did. Following it with their eyes, sitting back.

It finished and Bobby got up to leave.

‘Better be going,’ he said.

He started picking up empty bottles and bottle caps off the coffee table, clearing up. Tom began to get up when Bobby stopped cold. He was frowning.

‘What’s up?’ Tom said.

Bobby collapsed to the floor, scattering bottles and bottle caps everywhere.

Tom said, ‘Bobby, what’s up?’ Somehow hoping to get an answer. ‘You playing?’

He was lying on his back staring up at the ceiling, breathing heavily, then his eyes closed and his breathing looked like it had stopped.

***

Sandra Owen pressed the answer button and said into the headset, ‘Go ahead caller, what’s the address and the nature of your emergency?’

‘Hi yeah I need an ambulance to number 42 Hamilton Drive. My friend’s stopped breathing I think he had a heart attack.’

***

‘You were dead for almost five minutes,’ he said.

Bobby nodded. He looked tired and not altogether there.

‘D’you feel alright, do you need the doc again?’

Bobby shook his head. ‘Don’t need anything,’ he said.

Doc said you’d pull through if you were healthy. I guess you’re pretty healthy for a big guy.’

***

Ten minutes later Bobby went back under. He was unconscious all night and in the morning the doctor came in.

Tom was asleep in the chair, one leg hooked over the arm, his back pressed uncomfortably against the other arm. He was awoken by the sound of the doctor moving around Bobby.

‘What you doing, doctor?’ Tom said.

He was holding an eyelid back, flicking the torchlight into his eye and then away.

Tom saw that it was Dr Wainwright again, still on the same shift by the looks of the messy hair, shadow of stubble and tired eyes.

‘At the moment I’m checking to see if his pupils are reacting to the changes in light.’ He switched to the other eye and did the same.

Then he took out a small needle and prodded Bobby’s finger with it. He did it again. He tried the other hand, he tried both feet.

‘What’s up, doc?’ Tom said. He wasn’t aware of the accidental reference and neither was the doctor.

He went over to the monitor and started pressing buttons, checking things. Tom watched him as he let out a sigh and turned around.

‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this,’ Dr Wainwright said. ‘But Robert has fallen into a coma.’

Tom just sat there.

‘At the moment I can’t say how long it might last, and I can’t say whether he will ever come out of it.’

***

Tom thought about the light at the end of the tunnel for days. He wasn’t sure how he felt about it, whether he agreed with Bobby.

He decided to ask Bobby if he had seen the light when he had been dead five minutes. He’d ask him when he woke up.