“Would you like something for the pain?”

His mouth and throat was dry as the New Mexico desert. Rolling his sandpaper coated tongue around the inside of his mouth, he tried to work up some saliva to lubricate his throat so he could respond.

“No!”

Her white uniform looked like a bad wrap job with Saran Wrap on a cheap ham sandwich. Was this why she became a nurse, she wondered? To play baby sitter? How long can this asshole survive?

The lines on his face were deep gray.  Like scrawls from a number two pencil on wet paper.  He squeezed his eyes shut as his breath caught in his throat.

She reached for the emesis basin, knowing that projectile vomiting was on its way. His head lurched upward off the pillow. She was a second too slow. He gave up his most recent tube fed delight. This offering missed the emesis basin, splashed on her wrinkled uniform, over the side of the bed rail, and came to rest on the chair she slept in at his bedside each night. His head fell back on the pillow and the convulsive rise and fall of his chest ceased.

The nurse reached above his headboard to press the Code Blue wall button.

The medical examiner’s assistant stood between two tables in the morgue. She was dressed in blue surgical scrubs with a bulky red sweater pulled tightly around her shoulders. The morgue reminded her of a meat locker. So cold. Both bodies were open from groin to chest. Each piece of cold meat was a breathing human just a few short hours ago. Beside each body cavity the vital organs and a section of ribs lay heaped in a pile. The place smelled like a butcher shop.

The assistant pick up a power saw and began cutting into the man’s skull. She removed a palm-sized section of bone from the skull. The shriveled brain was removed from the his skull and placed on the autopsy table. The assistant glance at a clock on the wall across the room. Time was twelve thirty a.m. Beneath the clock was a faded poster of Alfred E. Neumann with the words, “What Me Worry?” along the bottom.

The morgue assistant turned back to the other table. She picked up a woman’s organs and placed them in plastic bags  She dropped the spleen, heart, liver, kidneys, and other body parts into the empty chest cavity. She had to knead the bags so as to make them all fit. She laid the ribs on top of the plastic bags.

“Well, Doc, it’s break time. Can I bring you anything from the cafeteria?” The assistant removed her blood and organ stained gloves, tossed them into a trash bin and left after the medical examiner indicated he wanted nothing.

In Pediatric Intensive Care a small group of doctors and nurses worked over a single bassinet. To the untrained eye it appeared as though the participants were dancing to a different drummer. In truth, their movements and actions would have put an expensive Swiss timepiece to shame.

This was the third time the infant had been coded in as many hours. “Clear!,” a doctor shouted. The young body twitched as the tiny paddles were press against its chest. The green screen on the overhead monitor went from straight line to small undulating waves.

“We got him back again,” someone said. The group stepped back as one. After a final examination of the tiny infant’s eyes and chest, the pediatric code team left the room.

A young nurse pulled a chair to the bassinet and sat down to assume her watch.  She removed a tattered paperback from a pocket and began to read about the dashing young man pleasing a beautiful (of course) young maiden in some medieval meadow after he saved her life from something or other.

End