Love is in the Oxygen Mask

On a particularly exhausting night duty as a junior doctor in the ER (Emergency Room), I dragged my legs in a drowsy limp toward the ICU.

I stood in the middle of the room and watched.

There is always a lot of life happening in a hospital. In the brief interlude between pushing drugs into iv lines and jumping on someone’s chest to restart their heart, I like to stand in the middle of the room and soak in all this life around me.

I watched as an old, dark-skinned, overweight, bowlegged man wobble from side to side as he quietly waded through the ICU door. Family members are generally discouraged from coming into the ICU due to the lack of space. Judging from his soft steps and sheepish glances, our old man was probably already made aware of this. He walked up to a woman, well into her 60s, wrapped in an orange saree, propped up at 45 degrees on an ICU bed, and breathing heavily into an oxygen mask.

Her eyes were closed, and her palms met, fingers interlaced, as if in silent prayer. He looked at the tubes poking into her hand, the ECG leads stuck onto her chest and the squiggly lines formed on the screen with an occasional “beep” noise. He saw her curled up in a corner of the big air conditioned ICU room, at the mercy of medicines and machines that he did not understand and tightened his grip on the tattered cloth bag in his hand. His shirt was unbuttoned at the top and his heart was bare.

The look of fear and sorrow that he wore melted into tender affection and soft concern as she shifted in her bed and opened her eyes. Their eyes met and he smiled. He told her, "Don't worry, I'll be standing just outside the ICU."

She smiled back weakly and enquired whether he had eaten anything and how he had managed to pay for the ambulance. I guess it takes more than a heart attack to erode a bond etched deep into the myocardium*. As he was being escorted out of the ICU by the hospital security, he turned back multiple times and told her with words first and with gesticulation later as he moved further away, that he'll be outside, waiting.

I guess many of us will probably die curled up in an ICU bed, like the paatti** in our story. The thought of ceasing to exist is frightening, but having someone sneak into the ICU just to let you know that they will be waiting outside for you, probably makes it easier.

*-heart tissue

**-Tamil word for elderly woman/grandmother