I was awakened by a loud knock on my door and a frantic call from an Air Force nurse. “Doctor, please hurry. Peggy Hooker is bleeding.”

Despite our inexperience, young interns like myself were the first line of defense for in-hospital emergencies. During our nights on-call we came to expect the unexpected. 

I had just drifted off to sleep in the doctor’s quarters, a short distance down the hall from Peggy Hooker’s room on the renal metabolic ward. She wasn’t my patient but we all knew her story. Peggy was a renal failure patient who had received a cadaveric kidney in one of the first renal transplants at Wilford Hall. Pride of the accomplishment soon faded when the kidney showed signs of rejection. She went on to develop a lymphosarcoma, rumored to be the same cancer that had taken the life of her deceased benefactor. Most likely, however, the sarcoma resulted from the immune suppressant effects of her anti-rejection drugs.  Regardless, she knew her days were numbered. 

I arrived to find the patient surrounded by medical personnel and awash in a sea of her own blood. Razor blades were lying everywhere along side deep slashes in her wrists, arms and neck.  As we desperately tried to slow the bleeding, she pleaded, “Please let me die.” She had given up all hope.

When a corpsman lifted her left breast to apply the last of the EKG leads, we gasped. In an attempt to reach her still beating heart, she had made a deep cut completely through the chest wall. 

In the end she was unsuccessful and you could say we saved her temporarily. Not from a lack of respect for her wishes, but rather because we had no choice. 

The wounds were closed in surgery and Peggy lived another month before finding peace. The final diagnoses: renal failure, failed kidney transplant, lymphosarcoma, hyperparathyroidism and, I would add, battle fatigue.