Tales of Disturbance

The Brain

The consultant neurosurgeon stands in the middle of the trauma unit and suspects he no longer exists. He considers, as machines bleep around him, that inside he is also a kind of machine and that is what he has become. 

He considers, as he removes gown and gloves, as he washes his hands in the surgery sink, if non existence is actually possible. Could a person become so boundaryless, so without lines and form and material definition, that they were really more absent than present? What made a person anyway? Life was not simply defined by being alive. 

Life was love. Family. Friends.

He had none of those things. Where did that leave him?

His job. Yes.

And ideas. It came out in ideas. The ideas for his inventions.

But also small ideas. What you said to your friends and colleagues for this was creation was it not? Words created life. He had noticed a growing reduction in his speech recently. Once he would have taken around 7000 words to explain something, for he had dearly loved to talk. Now he edited himself.  Now he condensed things. Reduced his explanation or aside or story or soliloquy down to, say about 20 words focusing only on bold headlines. Summary explanations. No frills. He took no chances because when it came down to it, who was really listening anyway? And when he spoke in social settings, he delivered only cliches; nothing unexpected. This was safest.

He sometimes, not often, thought about the patients with brain injuries that he had managed to resuscitate and stabilise, yet were without consciousness. He thought of the non-comprehending eyes and ears and the minds that were elsewhere. Totally checked out of this world. Waiting in line maybe to get into the next. Being yanked crudely back by him, a man who was essentially dead himself.

He thought of the demeaning rehabilitation that followed for these patients. Therapists who worked with these individuals for 15 months just so they could use a knife and fork again. 

Were they alive? Really?

Was he? 

Day by day, he often considered, his colleagues confirmed his non existence. 

But mainly his colleagues, along with his ex-wife and children were complicit in this absence; this lack of being alive. It is not that they treated him with disrespect persay. It's more that they spoke to him in a way that suggested he could have been a stranger: always polite and only when absolutely necessary. 

And when he issued instructions he merely became a disembodied voice, morphing into a sequence of words without power, floating lethargically towards them and failing to connect.  All conviction has gone from his words. He hears and hates the predictable phrases he utters. The instruction might as well come through a computer portal. There is nothing distinguishable. Nothing human. 

He has years of experience and esteemed qualifications; but these mean zero if you are not liked. If you can't hold your own in a conversation. His assets even seem to leave him at a disadvantage. In a bar for example, he intimidates people - ordinary people- when he tells them what he does. He sees their eyes widen and their heads turning away. Then there is the embarrassing silence or the change of subject. So he mainly stays silent. 

And he feels this silence surrounding him - becoming bigger and denser as the years pass him by. 

With colleagues, his silence says I agree. To the extra shifts. To the nights - five in a row and no breaks -to the training I am not paid to do. I agree to it all. I am a doctor, but I am really a doormat and a shadow and really I hate myself.