Beggers and Choosers

I sit inside the "fishbowl" - the nursing station that has glass panes separating the healthy from the sick. I twiddle my thumbs mentally as I glance at the screens that show changing numbers and squiggles. Numbers that show the heart is beating: how fast, how slow, how hard, how irregular. Numbers that show the lungs are breathing: how fast, how slow, how deep, how shallow, how effective. Here, the human being is reduced to a series of numbers and lines.

I am in the Intensive Care unit.

Where patients are asleep, bound to their surrounding machines and monitors by tubes and lines. Watched over by their assigned nurse with a hovering pen, ready to record the new numbers. Ready to adjust another knob to crank up the breathing support, the blood pressure support.

I am in a living physiology lab.

Challengers earn their entry inside the arena with the failure of more than two organ systems. Armed with antibiotics, IV fluids, painkillers and pump pushers, they wrestle and tackle their nemesis: Sepsis, Kidney Failure, Lung Failure. Retreated into the ever-expanding fluid-filled physical body, the tug of war of life and death takes place in an unseen realm. Some are winners, and go on to battle smaller enemies, like boredom, anxiety, lethargy, adjusting to leglessness. Some are not so lucky, and run on borrowed time.

Like Mr D.

Everyday he seems more gaunt. His hollow, sallow cheeks and semi-closed eyelids over softened eyeballs speak louder than the surprisingly good numbers his machines generate. The moisture in his body does not rise and fill his skin but somehow fall dejectedly, surrendering to gravity, to the dependent areas of his body. It's not that he was in a great condition before the illness either, with decades of alcoholism and smoking eating away and ageing him beyond his years. But I feel he is leaving, even though nothing else seems to have changed.

A wise person once told me, that initially people noticeably age in the space of ten years, then five, then three, then one, then by the matter of months, weeks, and when they are towards the end, in the units of mere days, hours, minutes.

If that is the case, then I pray for you, Mr D. I pray that you go to a good place, a good life, and catch a glimpse of your true nature unrestricted by this physical shell. May you be well and happy, and free from suffering.

May you go in peace.