Ugly Babies 3 Ghosts Redemption by Kirk James Ward

Author:Kirk, James Ward
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: James Ward Kirk Publishing
Published: 2016-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

Kate Uraneck

Sentinel Event

(Editor’s Choice Award Winner)

I’ve always hated Trauma Bay 6.

And I think the feeling is mutual.

My enmity began when I visited the Goshen Hospital emergency department on a job interview, and the staff took me on a tour of the 14 treatment areas. Trauma Bay 6, or TB6, was the only room with four complete walls and a door, and it was the 6th in order of the treatment areas. All the other areas were divided by hospital curtains and typically had two to three beds in each area. TB6 was separate because this was where they brought the brutally traumatized, the massive heart attacks, the geisering G.I. bleeds, and the crushed children.

TB6 was a sad room to die in, with its scuffed and faded pale green walls, chipped floor tiles, and glaring overhead fluorescent lights that constantly emit a droning low-level buzz. Along the wall at the foot end of the room hung a dreadful Thomas Kinkade print, Dogwood Chapel, that some artistically challenged interior designer thought would be soothing. It seemed immoral that someone’s final view of the world would include such an insipid image. For this sin alone, I took a personal dislike to Trauma Bay 6.

But that wasn’t the only reason I hated this room, and it’s for this reason I am telling this story. I wonder if confessions count if no one is listening.

To understand my story you have to know about my one special talent. I have the ability to witness someone’s soul, being, or whatever you choose to call a person’s living essence, exit the body.

The first time this happened was also the first time I was physically present when someone died. As a newly minted resident, I was assisting a “slow code” of a 92-year-old woman with end stage liver cancer. This resuscitation was hopeless, but the family hadn’t signed the Do Not Resuscitate order. Since no harm could really come of it, my senior resident gave me, the intern, responsibility to brutalize her last 20 minutes of life.

Do you know what a terrible sound brittle geriatric ribs make as they crack under the weight of a 130-pound intern doing chest compressions? Trust me, CPR is barbaric.

When I discharged 300 joules with the cardiac defibrillator into her bird-like chest for the third time, my hands still on the paddles, I felt an intense vibration through my arms and up to my head. Then I saw it—a disturbance in the air, like the thermal haze one sees shimmering above intense heat. But there was no fire over this old lady, only cold lifeless air. This thin plume emanated from her slack open mouth and wafted to the ceiling, where it lingered briefly. A slim thread of a connection tethered this spectral cloud to the dying old woman. Then I felt the air pressure suddenly increase, as if the room was squeezing me, followed by a pop in my ears. The thread tore and the shimmer disappeared. I knew intuitively that the old woman’s being had taken its leave.

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