ICU lament

She lay there. Still. Mechanical breath raising and lowering her chest with a slight pause – a stutter in the system. The monitors flashed green and red, moaned indecipherably, whirs and screeches that – unmet by rushing attendants – were usual sounds. T’s head bandaged tightly at the crown, odd pinkish coloring against her soft brown face swelling beneath. Scratched chin scabbed but healing.

Diagonal to her walled cubicle, angled so that only his blanketed legs were visible, he lay battered and broken.

His head, bandaged in white. Instead of a uniform ring, incongruent strips stretched haphazardly, clinging delicately to the places where Shoe’s skull had been. His face swollen beyond recognition. His usually bright eyes lost behind square patches of gauze.

At once the certainty that he’d soon be countering me in some public health debate was lost like a precious ring slipped from a long finger and settled, unnoticed, on a murky lake bottom.

I wiped my nose, snot leaking warm and mingling with stunned tears. I had expected bad, but tv bad, bad where everyone goes home at the end of the hour.

Returned to the waiting room, Randee hugged my neck – a gesture of shared loss that broke the insufficient emotional dam I’d been holding onto. I sat on the waiting room bench, hard and wooden, and juxtaposed Shoes’ and T’s emotionless faces against memories of their healthy laughter.

Around me, Shoes’ dad, T’s boyfriend, moved about sharing a joke with Davis and Meri – friends on the other boda that fateful Friday night. Friends that came upon the broken bodies of our friends flung from the boda by a hit and run driver. Friends that moved them from asphalt to ambulance, questionable Mulago hospital to reputed IHK.

Day four of their attentive vigil, they were all dry eyed. I was the traitor to the collective serenity. The relative improvement of T invisible to my newly seeing eyes. BLB arrived a few moments later, another welcome hug against the sadness and sense of helplessness and foreboding. Moments passed, and I regained my composure, offered a smile instead of tears.

For T, despite machine’s breath and nature’s swelling, the prognosis is good. The expectation is consciousness in the next few days. Already weaned from the morphine meant to keep the pain at bay, her family waits patiently for alert and recognizing eyes, for stability that can survive the flight to India and recovery there.

But Shoes…

his beautiful and gracious father emphatically shared his appreciation at our presence, the pleasure of seeing so many people touched by his son to gather in the small room- the covered patio outside- to sit in vigil with him as he waited for his wife and a miracle to arrive.

Shoe’s mother arrived, but the miracle joined that ring on the murky lake bottom. Early Wednesday morning B, Shoe’s roommate, whispered me awake.

“he’s fading…”

The harshest of realities, he was already gone.

I didn’t accompany B to the hospital. Substantial as Shoe’s imprint has been in my life over such a short time, my presence – my witness to his passing – felt wrong; although sitting on the couch wasn’t right either.

But then what could be right about a 25-year-old, fourth year medical student, fogarty scholar, gentleman, whiskey drinking, laughter filled, ray of sunshine losing sodium and blood pressure in a crowded ICU?

Chance introduced us and an impatient driver forced our farewell. Short time irrelevant, the memory of him etched in my memories weighed against his new absence is epic.

Tags: family, friends, health, travel, uganda, work