The never ending sleep

 

I don’t know what to put as a title for what I am going to write. Today morning I was greeted with the death news of one of our patients who was admitted in the ICU. He was a young guy who just touched twenty. An undergraduate student. He was having a normal life till one and a half year back, when he started having bowel symptoms predominantly constipation. Sad to say, none could treat his illness nor find what it is. He died without a diagnosis. He had underwent multiple laboratory and painful tests in this period and finally he ended up in our casualty with complete bowel obstruction.

***scene 1 ***

While trying hard to approximate and close the laparostomy wound on his soulless body, I glanced at his face. He was looking peaceful. It made me recount my first encounter with him while he was alive. He was in agony, he wanted to get rid of the giant nasogastric tube stuffed in his nose. His abdomen was hugely distended and I could see his bowel creating ripples on it.

***scene 2***

“Why can’t you help me to clean this bowl? Whom do you think you are…?” my senior colleague was shouting at the nursing staff, he was at the brim of a breakdown, taking part in surgery after continuous 48 hrs strenuous duty. The male nurse refused to help him with the big bowl which was overflowing with stool removed from our patient. His large intestine was the size of a trumpet and completely filled with semisolid and solid stools which had to be removed. The staff wanted the orderly to come to clean up the mess.

After taking part in his first surgery, I was happy that I chose to become a surgeon. We has made a diverting stoma which we believed to help him out of obstruction and agony. I was proud that we could give him the relief from symptoms, which he could not get from any physician. I was confident in explaining what had we done to him and how it is going to help him after the surgery to his sister. His sister was a well-educated girl. She cared so much for him.

***scene 3***

My colleague who was in charge of his bed for most of the time, told me, that his sister was grabbing his hand and not letting him go after her brother’s death. She was accusing us for doing those procedures, which ultimately relieved him from this world. His father was crying, he was recounting how dearly he looked after his son. The second surgery was done when his abdominal drain started showing pus, which was not expected. On second exploration, we found he had developed perforation of bowel at another site. But his body system had already been crashed that, he never made it to the normal physiological mode after second surgery.

There are things which are hard to explain. Like the loss to that family. The way his dreams were crushed. His eyes were vivid, it said he wanted to live. He wanted to enjoy life. He never have thought that it was his last journey from home, when he left to the hospital that morning. His sister had hope. She believed we could save her brother. But what happened was not expected. But somewhere in my mind I can recollect his face, after the first surgery, telling me he is feeling better.