29th
Speaking of beeping:
Leave it to Tony’s inspiring writing to reach into a forgotten corner of my brain and pull out something I’d been meaning to jot down.
You ever go outside in the early morning, as the sun’s coming up, and listen carefully to birdsong? I do it almost every morning. Sometimes I try to join in, whistling back the best match I can manage, wondering if I fooled any of them.
The week before last, I spent an unplanned day in the ER. My gurney was parked in one of three bays in the trauma room, where I lay for hours, being poked, questioned, monitored, examined, observed, and abandoned as a relentless stream of far more critical patients were wheeled in, worked on, and - in all but one case - processed further into the hospital.
The one exception was a guy, only slightly older than me, who arrived in traumatic cardiac arrest. He was screaming, violently afraid and in pain. I’d never witnessed death like that before, right next to me. It was unreal, yet ordinary. Sadness and curious acceptance comingled. I paid rapt attention to his final minutes in this world. When he died, his pain died too, and his yelling subsided.
From the aural clearing his passing left behind, the beeping called to me. Like the birds, I thought. And I started calling back.
