It was a quiet, fragrant, cool summer evening. Close to midnight. I was sitting outside my examination room, my feet stretched out on a chair, leaning back comfortably as I gazed up at the sky. Suddenly I heard something in the distance, rapidly approaching. A tractor was barreling down the main road in town that ran to the villages. Reluctantly I pulled myself together and stood up.

I made out four or five people on the back trailer as it rumbled past me on the cobblestones. I sensed they were taking someone in critical condition to the health center on the other side of town.

Doctor Ferit from Giresun, who had the bad habit of getting everything wrong because he was simply biding his time till he got a post in Ankara, was on duty in the Health Center that night. Figuring I was in the clear, I settled back into my chair. But things didn’t work out in my favor. It seems Ferit had left for Ankara without telling anyone. So there was no one at the Health Center. Five or ten minutes later the same tractor pulled up at my place. Health manager Erdinç was sitting next to the driver.

In the back a fat man lay motionless with a group of six or seven men and women crowded around him, pulling at their hair and beating their chests.

Grabbing my stethoscope, I scrambled up onto the trailer and, pushing the women aside, I kneeled over the man. Right away I knew he had died some time ago.

His people told me they hailed from a village that was 30 or 40 kilometers away and so it seemed unlikely they could have got a man who had suffered a heart attack out on the dirt roads to B, in time.

In quick and clear movements I checked his other vital signs but I nevertheless thought it was only right for me to perform CPR on the man to satisfy his relatives. I jumped to it. As I placed my two hands on the man’s chest, two woman jumped at me, screaming, and I continued to pump.

“Don’t crush him, for the love of God, don’t crush the man …”

As I struggled to fend them off, I continued to apply CPR, and I shouted over at the men:

“Oh brothers will you get these two off me!”

As one of the men tried to convince a woman to get down off the tractor, he said those words that would make my heart shiver every time I heard them:

“Come on, sister, let the doctor be so he can bring my brother back to life!”

10 or 15 minutes later I felt there was no point in trying any longer and I stopped CPR, jumped off the tractor and walked over to my examination room. With concern in their eyes, the men came over to me, waiting for me to say something. Sadly, I said:

“My condolences.”