With chalk-white lips and a now bald head, Alexander Litvinenko collapsed against a pillow, a hospital gown around his chest, and told the world he believed he had been poisoned.
When the story of the former Russian spy came to light and this iconic symbol appeared on the front page, Dr. Jim Down, a young representative of the ICU of University College London Hospitals, tried to see if this mysterious patient in the new looking ward may be right.
In November 2006, when Litvinenko, 43, a former worker of the KGB’s successor, the Federal Security Service and now Kremlin critic in the pay of MI6, arrived at the room vomiting and losing weight and hair, Jim was part of the team. .
Jim is also guilty of breaking the news of his death after 3 cardiac arrests to Litvinenko’s wife, Marina, and 12-year-old son, Anatoly.
Still, he still had no idea what had killed the spy until later that night, when radioactive polonium-210 after all gave the impression in tests.
It was later discovered that Litvinenko likely had a poisoned cup of tea in a London hotel, allegedly in the hands of former Russian agents under Vladimir Putin, although Russia denies any involvement. A four-part ITV drama titled Litvinenko, starring David Tennant, which began on Monday, describes the grim events that unfolded.
Jim shows that after learning of the cause, he promised to keep it a secret through a Miss Marple-like figure from the Health Protection Agency, who arrived at the ICU with his own teabottle. There is no room for the fact that he feared for his own exposure, as well as that of his team, adding pregnant nurses.
“The initial tension that he died, it was highly publicized, he was a young boy and I didn’t know why,” Jim recalls of that nightmarish period. Giant dose array I didn’t think I was going to die from acute radiation poisoning, yet I wondered if I might be at a higher risk of leukemia in 10, 20 years.
Due to secrecy requirements, he and the hospital did not immediately disclose the fact, and Jim now believes that a major technique may have been taken.
For 3 days after Litvinenko’s death, his structure was under intensive care as investigators frantically scoured London after his last moves. When the staff heard the word polonium on the news, they were terrified.
“I think the lesson I learned was what my duty is,” Jim recalls. “There were conflicting priorities. It was a big incident and there was a public fitness challenge in London. But my duty is to the patients and staff.
Although Litvinenko gave him a large dose of the chemical, which meant he had no chance, measurements showed that the staff was not in danger.
But by taking a brilliant look at the episode in his memoir, Life in the Balance: A Doctor’s Stories of Intensive Care, Jim captures those immediate fears.
“Resuscitation is chaotic and messy, so several limbs came into contact with their physical fluids,” he wrote.
“He had vomited on the face of the doctor who had inserted the breathing tube into his lungs. Would this vomit have contained polonium? And if so, how many?And how much too much?
“The nurses had treated his urine, sweat and blood. Could we be sure they had been in danger?They had a right to know. “
However, despite the intrigue that swirled around him, Jim remembers that Litvinenko “calmed” before losing consciousness.
“I only met him awake once and I don’t forget that stoicism. He had presence and courage,” he recalls.
“He resigned himself to the fact that he had been poisoned and to feeling that he would not survive. “Remember that Marina did the same when she announced Litvinenko’s death.
“I think she knew it was coming,” he says.
Of this maximum bankruptcy of his career, he explains that it was as dark as any other. “I watched his interviews like everyone else but treated him at the same time,” she says. “In the intensive care unit, there were a lot of other people, general police officers but also counter-terrorism officers, I think. I don’t forget that it was when Spooks were very vital on television and I imagined them as the cast of Spooks.
The 52-year-old intensive care and anaesthesia representative remained in hospital and drew public attention to the covid-19 pandemic when BBC teams interviewed him in a report that brought us some of the first images of the inside of a covid-hit intensive care unit. .
Jim, a married father of twins, is shown in PPE amid disturbing scenes.
He now admits that he drove to the collapse in the summer of 2021 due to the scale of the disaster.
Traumatized and triggered by the death of a complex patient unrelated to the virus, his anxiety is overwhelming.
Fortunately, he searched and now brazenly admits that he is still taking an antidepressant and seeing a psychiatrist.
“I felt really bad, but I didn’t feel like I didn’t need to improve,” she said.
Jim was sent to the site of the Hatfield train crash in 2000, treating patients amid the carnage. He also dealt with those caught up in the July 7 London bombings in 2005, and described a young survivor in a graphic way in his memoirs. His lower extremities had suffered the full force of the blast and were a mutilated disorder of tendons, muscles and skin,” he wrote.
“It has become apparent that someone else’s foot was stuck in his thigh. “
However, none of this has compared to the great onslaught of Covid, which saw 30 critically normal ICU patients grow to 120 of the “sickest and most complicated patients we have treated,” Jim recalls.
He held iPads so dying patients could simply say goodbye to their families when Covid restrictions prohibited face-to-face contact.
At that point, he may simply not stop at the nursing home of his delinquent mother, who was suffering from dementia. His reaction to Boris Johnson’s Partygate scandal is predictable.
“The fact that the other people who set the rules and ask other people to do ordinary things don’t follow them . . . It makes you angry,” he said cautiously.
It now faces a new point of tension amid a beleaguered NHS. Nurses’ strikes and upcoming movements by young doctors have an impact on their work. Admissions with elective surgery admissions. Now we have to spend money, retain our staff by treating them properly. Especially after the pandemic, we really appreciate our colleagues.
He knows, like any of them, the sacrifices that have been made.
* Life in the Balance: A doctor’s intensive care stories through Jim Down (RRP £18. 99)
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