The Coma Patient : A Short Story

The Coma Patient: A Short Story.

Though the next day I wasn’t on duty, I found myself going several times just to check on him. His skin had yellowed and jaundiced into the colour of old wallpaper. His flesh had taken on the texture of peeling paint, as patches of fat where turning brown round his eyes, speckling his cheeks like ingrained dirt on a surface-top.

The patient had not been washed for days, and the grease shone under the electric light. The bleeps and rhythms of the machines, the soft neons of the electric screens, so familiar, soothed my disquiet. In the corner, a greying, dying solider, hauled himself to the window to smoke. Their story is my story, it belongs to each of us as completely as it does to us all.

The respiratory ward was emptying, we had seen three patients leave ‘giving up on paying their bills’ during the long, dry afternoon. A suffocating wind was choking our ventilation systems with dust and the porters where shirking duties This was what Dr Herut had nonchalantly informed me on the way in. I pitied her, I pitied the place. But I especially pitied Herut not because she was intelligent, but because she still cared about patients the way doctors used to.

“There are rhythms and seasons to sickness and death,” this is something your learn as you wrinkle is the white washed and tiled rooms where you can smell the edge of life. More in mid-week, strangely enough. I often wondered what day the coma patient would “give up on paying his bills.”

The charts where steady, as always, his fleeting pulse quickened as I touched his vein-crossed hands. For over a year, he had been lying there, somewhere, turned over regularly by the nurses to stop the skin-rot creeping up his back. I bent forward, wiping the sweat from his brows. His eyes opened briefly, unfocused, the pupils wide. He screamed sometimes, but most of the time he sobbed. It is a little known fact about coma patients, perhaps wilfully forgotten, that merely because they are unconscious does not mean they are either silent, subdued or still.

Doctor Herut would calm the other patients by saying he was not crying from his nightmares, but neurones and chemicals where randomly firing off as his brain slowly collapsed. I knew this was taking its toll on her, driving her slowly to that point I crossed in the army, when life and death suddenly become, one and the same.

Dror asked during one of these lectures, as the wails echoed down the hall, why the patient did not laugh, but only howl. Dr Herut didn’t reply for a moment, her eyes fixing on an freshly emptied bed. The blueish-gloom hid her eyes from us, but not her words – “Ariel would not laugh.” We dispersed without words to our files and patients after that.

A small child had lain in the bed opposite the patient a few weeks back, with severe if routine pneumonia. He would sit bolt upright, clutching a piece of wood with his brothers name etched on it. Hassan, I think it was. He shook almost uncontrollably when we tried to talk to him, dish plate eyes reflecting white gowns and glasses. He spoke only a few words our language, and when he spoke at all his lungs where so damaged there was no point trying to listen. The cleaners called him the ‘brown-sick thing’ from across the line, and I wondered if they stole his meals occasionally. His brown vomit stained the sheets irrevocably, and the smell brings bile to my mouth even to think of it.

The patient shrieked uncontrollably during the child’s short stay. He barely stopped until the white cloth had been draped over they little thing’s head. The gurling, the harrowing screams, oh if you had heard them, ceaseless day and night, they grew so intense that even Dr Herut showed signs of an impeding crack-up. It was then the nurses started saying, “Ariel’s not in a coma.” I heard mutterings in the staff room from some of the more religious doctors, especially the blue-eyed survivor Dr Weisz that this was a punishment from Hashem.

That evening I went back, I could see him now in the blueish-light, the echoing sobs. His eyes where wide, no, I knew this was no coma. The lights clunked off and the fans and pumps sighed and collapsed with a thud as I flicked the switch. I walked slowly, passing the reception desk and the security guards smoking in the courtyard into the warm night, so that I might look into the darkness between the stars. The closest thing to the desperation of broken men. Blessed be Oblivion, for she knows no sins.