“Raise your hands up”, I say.
She obeys while moving her fingers several times
against her thumbs in loose fists.
“Does it hurt?”
“No, only my neck hurts…and I can’t move my fingers”, she says.
“What happened?”, she asks.
I think she has had a concussion. Paramedics just brought her to me in the ER
and she has been asking us the same question every couple of minutes.
“What happened?” Followed by the words, “I can’t move my fingers”.
Her scalp isn’t bleeding. There’s a bump where her neck hurts.
Her ribs seem fine. “But I cannot move my fingers”, she says again.
“Yes, you can. You’re doing so right now. Can you touch your bellybutton?”, I ask.
She moves her arm towards her stomach and then hovers hesitantly
halfway between breast and belly button.
“It must be here”, she says. “But I cannot move my fingers.”
I touch her bellybutton. “It’s here, can you feel my hand?”
“No.”
I touch the arc of her ribs, “Can you feel this?”.
“A little.”
I touch her just below the collarbone, “Can you feel this?”
“Yes.”
“But please, I cannot feel my legs”, she says.
When you’ve worked in a hospital a while,
you learn that there is a nurse for every situation.
Today, I have the perfect one.
She senses the dread rising in me, whips around,
rummages through a drawer and hands me a reflex hammer.
“Use this”, she says. “Here for sharp, here for blunt.”
I stop my rioting thoughts in their tracks by listening attentively.
My brain zones in on her crisp and clear voice,
everything around her is a hazy copy of the scene,
and somewhere in my distant subconscious,
I can feel a part of me shutting down.
I am now on automaton as I proceed to test the patient with the hammer.
“Do you feel this?”
“Yes.”
“Do you feel this?”
“No.”
“Do you feel this?”
“A little.”
“Can you tell me if it’s sharp or blunt?”
“I can only feel a little…no, I can’t feel anything.”
Now I am using the hammer on her stomach. Now on her thighs.
I am hitting a little harder.
“Do you not feel anything? I’m hitting you!”
I am hammering on her knees now, in my mind there is a screaming disbelief.
“No…no…” she says, echoing the words in my mind.
“Please”, she says, “I can’t feel my legs… Oh God!”
I look across my patient and fall into the depths of the nurses’ eyes,
and all the answers to my fumbling mind’s questions are reflected in there.
I grab unto the cot railing and wait for my dizzy spell to pass.
The rest happens in a blur: call neurologist; speak with patient; inject medication; organise transport to neurosurgery…
In the morning, I report the case to my attending physician
as he pulls up the CT scans.
“That’s it”, he says.
“What do you mean?”
“That’s it. It’s done.”
And then, because it’s clear that I don’t understand.
“The damage cannot be undone”, he says.
I back up against the wall and slide down into a squat.
The scene of my conversation with her daughter is now replaying in my mind.
I am asking her what she already knows.
Then I’m telling her what we found on the CT scans.
And I am telling her that we are arranging to transport her mother
to neurosurgery for an emergency procedure.
And I am telling her, quite clearly, that even though there will be an operation,
she should brace herself for the fact that: this is it.
And I know from the dawning clarity on her face and her sudden tears
that she understands what I am saying.
That she knows, without really fathoming all the many different facets of sorrow
that will come with this information,
that this is final.
That her mother is now paralysed from the breast down.
She knows this because I am telling this to her and she believes me.
But then I see myself speaking to her, and I am suddenly painfully aware that,
even though I am telling her what she needs to know,
I myself do not believe my own words.
What is it that keeps me this naïve? Optimistic, perhaps unrealistically so?
Is this a coping mechanism for protecting heart and sanity?
For getting the job done despite being inundated by crippling sorrow?
Or am I just in denial?
Why am I the only one in this scenario who,
even as I write this several hours later,
still doesn’t know that
“It is done”?
Edit:
Weeks later the nurse shows me her obituary.
Indeed.
RIP GK.