Saturday, March 12, 2005
Irony
He felt tired as he slotted the scans onto the light box and looked at them.
They weren't good. Pretty bad in fact. Remarkable for a small occipital fracture, that there would be such a large fronto-parietal subdural haematoma, and such a huge haemorrhagic contusion. It just goes to show, all that stuff we learn in med school about coup and contra coup, and big brain boxes and loose brains in the elderly, it's all true.
All the damage was left sided too. Not so good in a right handed individual. Nor the degree of midline shift.
He went to see her and noted the bilaterally fixed dilated pupils, and the previous note of dolls eye -ve and corneal reflex -ve. He put his hand on her head for a while in silence. She shifted about once in a while, somewhere in that dreamworld we stop by before we pass onto the next. She was deaf to his hello, and he didn't bother with a formal GCS.
She was so small, and so fragile now. And she looked so, so tired. The bruise on her head wasn't so much a bruise as a scrape; utterly trivial; easy to overlook.
He wondered if anything more could have been done for her; there's always so much more we could have all done in retrospect.
But here and now, this was very much the end. He knew it.
In a short while the family would arrive to go variously into shock, guilt, and denial. Right now, here in the silence of the cubicle, this was a sacrosanct moment but he didn't really know what to do with it, except stand in silence for a while, and just... watch.
Eventually he left, to find the living. Some of them needed him, and his time here was done.
We do this day in, and out, in an endless cycle of drab mundanity; we make our eyes sympathetic, we furrow our brows and bow our heads, we try to look like we care, and to some extent, we do. We steel ourselves and watch in silence as the crying begins. We wish the moment was over, but we stay, because
We all know what the pain must feel like.
But in truth, we will never, really, know.
We open our mouths and let the dying words gush out; we protect ourselves with medi speak, it turns everything less personal, somehow.
We leave the families to their grief, we...
... must not forget.
*****
Life can be so fragile; so transient. Sometimes the most trivial of accidents swoop down into a moment madness that changes everything.
As he dully watched his hands grasping the steering wheel, and somewhere up ahead, the road, and cars rushing up to meet his field of view, being engulfed whole by it, and vanishing into the past like a bad B grade movie, he wanted so very much to pick up his phone and tell Her it's bad this time; really bad, nevermind what it is, but just hear him out. He was sorry... for their past. And really just to say hello, and he knew it would be too much to ask, really, just as he had no right to do what he once did a long, long time ago, but maybe, if you agreed, maybe we could be friends again.
Because not knowing Her was bad for him. As everyone says, a part of you dies... The colour drains from your world. Etcetc. The old cliches... are the ones that hold fast.
But he didn't know if the number still worked, and part of him knew that it wouldn't.
I've missed You, kiddo.
Grace and Peace.
They weren't good. Pretty bad in fact. Remarkable for a small occipital fracture, that there would be such a large fronto-parietal subdural haematoma, and such a huge haemorrhagic contusion. It just goes to show, all that stuff we learn in med school about coup and contra coup, and big brain boxes and loose brains in the elderly, it's all true.
All the damage was left sided too. Not so good in a right handed individual. Nor the degree of midline shift.
He went to see her and noted the bilaterally fixed dilated pupils, and the previous note of dolls eye -ve and corneal reflex -ve. He put his hand on her head for a while in silence. She shifted about once in a while, somewhere in that dreamworld we stop by before we pass onto the next. She was deaf to his hello, and he didn't bother with a formal GCS.
She was so small, and so fragile now. And she looked so, so tired. The bruise on her head wasn't so much a bruise as a scrape; utterly trivial; easy to overlook.
He wondered if anything more could have been done for her; there's always so much more we could have all done in retrospect.
But here and now, this was very much the end. He knew it.
In a short while the family would arrive to go variously into shock, guilt, and denial. Right now, here in the silence of the cubicle, this was a sacrosanct moment but he didn't really know what to do with it, except stand in silence for a while, and just... watch.
Eventually he left, to find the living. Some of them needed him, and his time here was done.
We do this day in, and out, in an endless cycle of drab mundanity; we make our eyes sympathetic, we furrow our brows and bow our heads, we try to look like we care, and to some extent, we do. We steel ourselves and watch in silence as the crying begins. We wish the moment was over, but we stay, because
We all know what the pain must feel like.
But in truth, we will never, really, know.
We open our mouths and let the dying words gush out; we protect ourselves with medi speak, it turns everything less personal, somehow.
We leave the families to their grief, we...
... must not forget.
*****
Life can be so fragile; so transient. Sometimes the most trivial of accidents swoop down into a moment madness that changes everything.
As he dully watched his hands grasping the steering wheel, and somewhere up ahead, the road, and cars rushing up to meet his field of view, being engulfed whole by it, and vanishing into the past like a bad B grade movie, he wanted so very much to pick up his phone and tell Her it's bad this time; really bad, nevermind what it is, but just hear him out. He was sorry... for their past. And really just to say hello, and he knew it would be too much to ask, really, just as he had no right to do what he once did a long, long time ago, but maybe, if you agreed, maybe we could be friends again.
Because not knowing Her was bad for him. As everyone says, a part of you dies... The colour drains from your world. Etcetc. The old cliches... are the ones that hold fast.
But he didn't know if the number still worked, and part of him knew that it wouldn't.
I've missed You, kiddo.
Grace and Peace.
