The other nurses from my floor came in with the crash cart, and I got the board. Doing CPR on a soft surface, like a bed, doesn’t accomplish much; you need a hard surface to really compress the patient’s chest, so every crash cart has a two-by-three-foot slab of hard fiberboard for just this purpose. I told one of the doctors to help pick her up so I could put the board under her: she was now dead weight, and heavy.

I kept doing CPR until the condition team arrived, which seemed to happen faster than I could have imagined: the intensivists  the doctors who specialize in intensive care  the I.C.U. nurses, the respiratory therapists and I’m not sure who else, maybe a pulmonologist, maybe a doctor from anesthesia.

Respiratory took over the CPR and I stood back against the wall, bloody and disbelieving. My co-workers did all the grunt work for the condition: put extra channels on her IV pump, recorded what was happening, and every now and again called out, “Patient is in asystole again,” meaning she had no heartbeat.

They worked on her for half an hour. They tried to put a tube down her throat to get her some oxygen, but there was so much blood they couldn’t see. Eventually they “trached” her, put a breathing hole through her neck right into her trachea, but that filled up with blood as well.

They gave her fluids and squeezed bags of epinephrine into her veins to try to get her heart to start moving. They may even have given her adenosine, a dangerous and terrifying drug that can reverse abnormal heart rhythms after briefly stopping the patient’s heart.

The sad truth about a true cardiac arrest is that drugs cannot help because there is no cardiac rhythm for them to stimulate. The doctors tried anyway. They went through so many drugs that the crash cart was emptied out and runners came and went from pharmacy bringing extras.

When George Clooney and Juliana Margulies went through these routines on “E.R.,” it seemed exciting and glamorous. In real life the experience is profoundly sad. In the lay vernacular of Hollywood, asystole is known as “flatlining.” But my patient never had the easy narrative of the normal heartbeat that suddenly turns straight and horizontal. Her heartbeat line was wobbly and unformed, occasionally spiked in a brief run of unsynchronized beats, and at times looked regular, because chest compressions from CPR can create what looks like a real cardiac rhythm even though the patient is dead.