“I have done something: Oh, God! I’ve done something real at last” Why does Andrew say this? What does it mean?

Andrew Manson, just returned from a medical college was quite new in medical practice. He was rather new in every experience of worldly life. He had opened his own surgery in the neighbourhood of drillers and miners. It was not doing very fine as his condition predicts. His lady love also ditched him. He had to go with Joe Morgan whose wife was to deliver a baby.

After a long struggle the baby took birth at dawn. But the most ghastly havoc the luck had played was that the baby was stillborn! Seeing the condition, he at once realised that it was a case of Asphyxia Pallida, the same case he had treated in Samaritan. Then there was no resting for Andrew for next two hours. He instantly gave the child hot and cold bath alternatively. He tried to give artificial respiration and after his long struggle the child responded. Only then he took himself a breath of relief. Finally when the baby returned to natural self, he handed to the nurse and left for his own home.

While returning home, when Andrew’s footfalls joined the footfalls of the night-shift drillers, he felt quite relieved forgetting all about his disappointment at the hands of Christine and uttered these words, “I have done something……”He clearly regarded it job a doctor is weighed for.