The important thing to understand is that responding to cardiac arrests in the middle of the night is often a dangerous task for doctors. Firstly, all cardiac arrest bleeps arise when you have just got yourself vaguely comfortable on a skimpy sheeted on-call room bed and your dreams consist of a mixture of dishy doctors from ER and green pyjama wearing patients. The cardiac arrest is invariably heralded by the voice bleep. That means that your bleep will always go off, just as your dream is getting interesting. Cue the faceless switchboard operator, managing to convey urgency but sound disinterested at the same time "Cardiac arrest - Ward 8b. Cardiac arrest - Ward 8b". At this point you have to run, whatever you are doing and whether you know where Ward 8b is or not. You must just run in the general direction of the sick people, hoping you might end up in the right place.
This was the case with Dr D.D. Superbra. She believed that there were essentials to running down corridors and up stairs, tripping over discarded clinical waste bags, sliding on the wet floor and ultimately landing on or close to the cardiac arrest patient. Dr Superbra believed, that a bra offering unnatural uplift and cleavage, was an essential accessory to every (female) junior doctor during this headlong sprint. Discussions had gone on in the doctor's mess only two weeks before, decrying the new t-shirt bras that simply did not hold the essentials in place while running. This had resulted in significant and debilitating chest wall problems, following the legendary night of four cardiac arrests. Symptoms were directly proportional to cup size and those doctors with an average bra size greater than 34C were most seriously affected.
On this particular balmy August night, the wards had been uncomfortably hot all day, the heating was on full because it was summer and the windows had been painted closed. The workload had been high and the white coat was getting heavier as the pockets filled. People were dying that night, well trying to die anyway. Dr Superbra decided to take a fifteen minute power nap. Her room had no bulb and the window in the corner revealed no moonlight shining in, at least the psychiatric unit would be quiet she thought to herself, shame about the medical wards, there would be no peace there tonight she knew. Why on earth couldn't heaven wait for once and give her a quiet night? Bleary eyed, feet aching and feeling more weary than she could ever have imagined in her medical school innocence, the good doctor decided to take off her white coat and her blouse - she needed to cool off and didn't want tell tale creases, declaring to her colleagues that she had given in to the need for a brief episode of respite. On-calls in the summer were difficult for everyone. The brain heated up, the body melted down, patients were sicker and more irritable and the nurses walked around in a daze.
She placed her bleep by the side of the bed, on the broken cabinet, adhering to the sticky rings of a thousand coffee cups, long drained. Darkness had made feeling the way around the room a must. She lay down on the bed, it creaked and a rat squeaked in reply, too tired to respond she reminded herself that the furry rodent who was her new room-mate was less threatening than the double-barrelled, Oxbridge qualified surgical registrar she held tried to refer her patient to half an hour before - yes she thought, it's true that rat's come in all sorts of shapes and sizes.
Dr Superbra drifted off into a wonderful dream, she was in ER and all those handsome doctors were vying for her attention. Suddenly out of the darkness "Cardiac arrest - Ward 7a, Cardiac arrest - Ward 7a". Her eyes sprang open and her disorientated mind struggled to find any point of reference in the gloom. She sniffed her way to her white coat, it had that antiseptic smell that clung to it long after the ward round was over. Coat in one hand, bleep in the other she struggled to open the door with one finger, squinting in the sudden light, she started to run, tripping over a bucket, falling down the stairs. She picked herself up and ran.
She was third to arrive at the cardiac arrest, "take over chest compressions" said the anaesthetist. Dr Superbra counted the number of compressions and looked up at her two male colleagues, what she couldn't understand was why they wouldn't look her in the eye, aiming instructions over her shoulder, eyes darting like a horizontal squint. We have a pulse said the registrar. DD stopped her compressions, breathing heavily and with a sheen of perspiration on her brow. The patient opened his eyes and looked up at her "am I in heaven?" he mumbled. The anaesthetist snapped "Nurse, get this man to ITU. He'll arrest again if he looks at that much longer!"
Dr Superbra stopped at the drinks machine and kicked it to dislodge her selection. As she bent to retrieve her diet cola she looked down at her chest and was in shock - there was just a bra, nothing else. They had all seen it, no-one had told her. The whole arrest team, the nurses, oh god no - the patient had seen it. This was one for the GMC for sure and how was she to explain her choice of uplift enhancing underwear over the more sensible and practical choices of her peers?
The next morning was the MDT meeting. Her cheeks were burning as she met the doctors from the arrest team, the night before. "Good show last night" the anaesthetist called across the room. The Medical Reg perked up and added "the patient has asked to see you again - he says you did him more good than anything we did!"
Dr Superbra took a seat at the back of the room. Still weary and looking forward to her bed, she wondered if there had been any cases of PTSD relating to bra exposure - now that's what I call a research project, she thought with a smile.