Also, Love (Part 13)

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BY PETER SOLIS NERY
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Friday, March 2, 2018
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THE Nurse Supervisor approached me, consoled me.

In my mind, I said, “Fuck you! You go into these heroics when the patient is already dead. Earlier, when he truly needed you, when I needed you to avert his death, you didn’t help us! You didn’t come to us! You never listened to me!”

They had been able to revive R in the code, they said. He needed to be transferred to the ICU. But I didn’t trust them. I didn’t believe them. I had a feeling that it was just all the injected drugs that got him going. Still, I signed the documents, and consented to hook him up to a ventilator.

At the ICU, R’s eyes remained glassy. They were like marbles, wide, staring, unblinking. I held his cold hands, as cold as fish. But I kept thinking that hearing is the last of the senses to go in a dying person. So, I said it out loud, “Sweetheart, I love you. I love you very much!”

He groaned after he heard “I love you” as if to acknowledge me, like he was just waiting for me to come to his side. And then, he convulsed for the last time, and his head limped downward. Oh, my God!

Once more, a code blue was called for R. This time by his ICU nurse. They asked me to step outside of the room. But because the wall was glass, I could see how they crushed his ribs and squashed his chest. They were jumping on his chest!

“Our Father in heaven…”

After twenty minutes, I realized that R wasn’t coming back to me. Silently, my tears kept falling like a spring.

Twenty-five minutes. I asked the Nurse Supervisor, who came to me again to offer a box of Kleenex, “Until when will they pound and trample his chest?”

If R were to survive this, his broken bones would have killed him anyway. He would be killed by the manner they revived him!

I looked at the clock. At exactly 11:14 p.m., on the seventh of December 2014, at the Intensive Care Unit of Sinai Hospital of Baltimore, RTG, my beloved husband, left the world to join the choirs of angels in eternity.

*

In the aftermath of R’s passing on, the branches of the shorter cashew tree reached out to the fallen trunk of the erstwhile tall and ancient cashew tree, and raised this to the brilliant and blinding sky./PN
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