DOCTOR COMIC - PART 6

Her name was the eponym for pain, in another language of course, and hereby HIPAA compliantly introduced to you, dear reader. She didn’t feel like eating before the increasing lethargy sent her off to our ER where she coded for an unspecified amount of time and came back to life miraculously with not even a single rib broken from chest compression. As a result, multiple organs within her cachectic body went on a coordinated strike and demanded further negotiation with life and death in the ICU.

The effort to wean her off the ventilator was eventful with multiple attempts of breathing tube self-removal requiring a multitude of sedation and complicated adjustment. Not a sigh of relief was there when the drama of the ventilator machine completed and she could breathe on her own from a nasal cannula, since the oxygen in her blood quickly dropped to an alarmingly low level whenever she yanked the oxygen off and hoarsely declared that she wanted to jump off a bridge.

So essentially, she was dependent on the nasal cannula and she became extra saucy whenever her oxygen turned low with her frequent dislodging of the device. Provided that she had the oxygen flowing at above 6 liter a minute, she would be more reasonable; however, she remained as feisty as possible. We had to put padded mittens on her hands to prevent her from digging into her thighs out of frustration since the wrist restraint stopped her from removing the cannula. Whenever I tried to put the mittens back after her uncanny successes to pull them off, I noticed her fingernails with chipped polish in the shade of red wine imprinting angry indentation over the thin translucence of her bony palms.