Chapter 2
The House of Usher
The night had come and wasn't ending, and I slept fitfully. I would wake up and look at the time, and then try to sleep again. Was she asleep? Was she trembling with the thoughts of the morning? I prayed that she was kept alive through the night. Only one more night, and her heart would be mended, and she would be able to laugh again. Or so I thought.
It was four o’clock in the morning. And I woke up and bathed. Soon I was on the empty road to the hospital. I explained to the hospital guards that my wife needed me at that hour, and they phoned someone, and I was allowed in.
The hospital was deserted. There were no visitors at that hour, and the patients were all silent in their beds. Only the beeps attuned to the many ailing hearts broke the silence. I entered the dreaded CVICU, and as I approached her room, I saw that a light had been switched on for her. She was awake and looked utterly exhausted. As I kissed her and gave her some water, I started an Indian hymn of strength on the phone’s speaker. We both listened to it in silence. It was soon going to be time.
The trolleys and stretchers arrived. She glanced at them briefly, and then looked at me, and lowered her head. With grave dignity and simplicity, she closed her eyes and remained still, with folded hands. Will she live? Will she ever see the stars and the moon again? She had agreed to be opened up again, but who knew what would happen to her, in the hours and days to come. Was this her final prayer? The antim ardaas. Only she knew, and the Gods knew, what she said in that prayer. Did she pray for herself, or for the well-being of her parents, of her husband if she was gone?
She was put on the stretcher with all her beeping instruments and wires. I requested that I walk along with her stretcher till the last door that opened into the operation theater. As we went towards it, I held her hand and finally, when it was time to say goodbye, I embraced and kissed her and looked into her eyes and whispered to her: “I am with you, always. I will wait for you.”
The doors closed and the long wait had begun. The doctors had told me that the operation would take four hours or so. I went to the empty waiting room and worried if her weak, slender, and gentle frame was going to be able to take the brutality of the procedure.
The hours passed. It was Sunday, and hers, being an emergency, was the only procedure. A TV monitor showed her patient number with a yellow light against it. Would it remain yellow? What would another color mean?
The hours passed. It was now more than four hours. Another hour. Then another. After the induction of anesthesia, she would have not felt anything. But where was she? After six hours, as I kept looking at the clock and at the yellow light against her number, my phone rang, and it was the chief surgical nurse. She said the operation was still going on, but that she had been taken off the heart bypass and her heart was beating. It took another three hours for the operation to finish.
Those nine hours had passed for her in darkness, and for me. The nurse came to me and told me that I should not be alarmed to see her after the operation. That she would be cold to the touch and that it would not be a pleasant sight. I did not know what to expect. But she was transferred to the CVICU, and I was told to wait a few more hours as she was stabilized and wired up again.
It was not easy to walk to her room and to dare to see her again. She was still under anesthesia. Her face was without color and puffed up, eyes closed, and a shiny glaze was on her eyelids to keep them for drying. A ventilator was doing the breathing for her, and there were dozens of intravenous lines sending her many strange drugs. A brick-like external pacemaker was making her heart beat. There was a large bandage on her sternum, under the hospital gown. There were IV needles in her neck and on her upper arms and on her lower arms. Leads for measuring her blood pressure and oxygen levels were on her body. Her lower legs were wrapped in compression pads which were connected to small pumps. And she was still in darkness.
The surgeon came and spoke to me. He told me that she had needed eight units of blood. That her heart had been bypassed for more than four hours. A typical heart surgery bypasses the heart for 90 minutes or so. And any time after 2 hours is a predictor of failure.
But she was alive.
I read in the doctor’s notes that, due to her “tenuous state”, she had been “prepped and draped” and lines inserted into her body before anesthesia. I wondered what she must have felt at the strange red antiseptic liquid being rubbed on her cold naked body under the blinding white lights and under the gaze of a dozen strange people holding long metallic tools and strange motors, and as needle after needle was inserted into her. I remembered her anxiety at getting even a regular immunity needle shot. And these were long, heavy needles inserted into her neck and elsewhere. I wondered, with horror.
The surgeon said that her veins were too tiny for the large needles when they started the bypass. They inserted the needles again and again and stretched the veins. And that she had suffered a severe vasoplegic shock (a steep decline in blood pressure) after her heart was turned back on. But that they managed to control it. What cataclysms her body must have experienced inwardly then. Nobody, not even she, knew.
But she was alive. Barely, but alive.
I was told she would not be woken up that day. I looked at her with immense love and tenderness, and kissed her cold forehead.
And wearily returned home. I hoped they took care of her ravaged frame.
What would tomorrow bring?
…
Would someone so acutely ailing have survived in an ancient time? Is surgery a blessing? It must be. But how brutal it is.
Empathy is to imagine and to feel another’s pain. Does the surgeon put away his empathy to achieve his aim?
The bonds of humanity are bonds of joy and of pain. There is not one without the other. As one light in many forms, we cannot help but reflect. And the closer the light of the other, the more acute the reflection.
On that day when millions pray to their God, her light was feeble. I had left home in darkness, shared the darkness with my beloved during the day, and returned home in darkness.
(to be continued)
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