For the last five weeks in the Intensive Care Unit there has been a man fighting for his life after being scratched by a cat.
There are occasions you come across situations where you feel compelled to ask: what happened to this person? The modus operandi of the HSA (Hospital Service Assistant - formerly known as Orderlies) is: don't ask. I generally don't. But there are occasions where you spend a bit of time with a patient and their nurse; there's a moment of down time and it seems okay to ask the question. In this particular circumstance it was: cat scratch. The guy had every conceivable tube coming out of him, was jaundiced and pretty much in a terrible state: I figured he had had an aneurysm. It all seemed a bit too much for an aneurysm, but what do I know. Cat scratch. He was in his late 40s.
So he died this morning.
I only ever spoke to him once where he responded. I spoke directly to him and he nodded at me. That was a nice moment as prior to that he was always in a coma. But then he went back into the coma.
Another HSA and I were returning from a previous job this morning, when a nurse grabbed us explaining she needed our assistance as the wife of the man who had just passed had collapsed in front of the lifts, and we needed to get her into a wheelchair. We succeeded in doing this and I was then asked to take his wife down to Triage as she was not doing okay. So a couple of nurses, her brother in law, and I, took the lift from the 4th floor to the ground floor. We must have been a sight, as the door lifts would open and people would look, back away and offer to take the next lift.
The nurse kept speaking to her, getting her to focus on breathing. But her grief kept unfurling and choking her. As I wheeled her down to Triage with her brother in law in tow I could feel her despair shimmering black in front of me. The abyss of loss of a partner of twenty years.
Once in triage they discovered that her heart rate was really high and so we had to rush her into the emergency room.
I returned upstairs to Intensive Care with her brother in law.
Returning to the ward a nurse asked if I was free to give her some help. Turned out she needed some assistance while she prepared the body of the husband who had passed away. Thus, I helped roll his body gently while the nurse cleaned and prepared him for wrapping in a shroud to be taken downstairs.
I'm writing this because I don't want to forget the privilege of this moment. To witness the bond a couple shared. To take the living and the dead on their separate journeys for just that moment. I looked at his face. His stubble. I felt like he might speak. Pushing her wheelchair, standing behind her, looking at her hair, her hands I was scared she might die.
There is a deep power to life that we look away from in our escape into the daily fantasy of Netflix and TikTok. It's there in the silence and in the breeze. It's in the importance of a face, the etched stories both of the living and the dead. Both beautiful and profound.
