loop, infinite

It snowed today for maybe half an hour. Maybe the biggest flakes I’d ever seen. I watched them fall from the hospital cafeteria, sitting alone in front of a window, eating potato chips rather than actual food because getting actual food would have involved standing in a (roughly) six-hundred-person-long line for (roughly) two thousand years.

And anyway, it’s a hospital cafeteria. The wait’s never worth it. The food always sucks. At least with a bag of chips, you know what the hell you’re getting. You can go anywhere in America to buy a bag of Ruffles. It’s going to taste exactly the way you’d expect. The only lunch you can completely trust is lunch that comes sealed in shiny airtight plastic.

I don’t know when it stopped snowing. I think I looked down at my cell phone to check the time and when I looked back up the snow had turned into rain in mid-fall.

There’s not much of a view out the cafeteria window. You see the parking garage. You see the mental health institute across the road. You see cars. You would have seen snow or rain, depending on what time you looked out today.

I looked back and forth from window to cell phone until it was time to go. Then I threw the empty plastic bag away and took the elevator upstairs.

I found out that while I was eating, a patient I’d been following had gotten sicker. He’d started choking, coughing. He couldn’t breathe anymore.

While I was eating, someone took him down to the intensive care unit, where someone else anesthetized him, thus allowing a third person to shove a tube all the way down the back of his trachea.

At the other end of that tube was a ventilation device. I went to the ICU and stared at it. I watched it push and pull air in and out of this guy’s lungs.

This guy has terminal lung cancer. His life expectancy had been “days to weeks.” Now that he’s in the ICU, it’s more like “days.”

I attempted to talk to him. He couldn’t hear me, of course. I couldn’t tell whether he was conscious.

The tube down his throat looked like a proboscis that belonged to a giant bug, one that was trying to suck his guts out via his mouth.

I could feel half-digested potato chips roll around in my stomach.

I realized it was actually fortunate that they got the tube down his throat. If the tracheal intubation had somehow failed, they’d have cut a hole in his neck and slid the proboscis in that way instead.

There are giant bugs all over the ICU, sucking away.

That place looks like the interior of an alien mothership. The patients look like kidnapped human test subjects. The doctors, in their masks, with their gloves, look like their captors, like their torturers.

I get weekends off. I won’t see this guy again until Monday. Unless he dies this weekend, in which case I won’t see him again ever.

Why the fuck am I doing this? I never asked to be a doctor, so why is that somehow exactly what I have to become? This guy never asked to die of cancer, so why is that exactly what he’s doing? Why is there no relationship between what we ask for and what we get?