BluE Scrubs

Pain comes in all sorts of form. Some acute, a bit like hit and run , and some chronic, trawling your emotions behind mercilessly on top of it's agonizing perpetual existence.


Sometimes, it prisons one's social life within the confinement of a frustration fortress. It changes one's attitude and perception about life.


I know of a few types. We only write about what we know and experienced they say, the others being not yet experienced by me, do exist but I pray that I never experience those. Now I will write, and it's on the ones I know of.


Yesterday I anesthetized a 78 year old man. It's almost always true that when an operation involves looking into somebody's abdomen at that age, the result it always undesirable.


That is only my conclusion, filed away neatly next to 'a man who loves alcohol and drugs'. Sometimes these conclusions fire away a certain reaction out of me, but sometimes all that it needs was a gargantuan transformer to augment a desirable, hypocritical attitude. I hate myself sometimes for my lack of ability to speak my mind.


The 78 year old man underwent the sigmoid colectomy, that is to my mum, taking the end bit of the bowels which contains faeces/turd/pooh/shit. It was a hell of an operation.


The consultant who was there to start with, who was my only hope of finishing on the dot, had to leave to attend to a 15 year old who apparently had trauma to his head and chest, in casualty. What I was left with was his snail, sluggy, _____ (insert any other slow moving creatures), assistant, a registrar (this is what you call a deputy boss in the medical hierachy), who will be finishing the operation.


Must he talk so much while doing the anastomosis (the bit where you join the two ends of the bowels together) ??? All in all he took blimming 6 hours to finish. A record breaking time for a simple sigmoid colectomy.


When I woke the patient up, which didn't just involve tapping his shoulder and whisper 'hello suh, wakie wakie', (no, not like that at all),
he woke up in agony. He was wailing, shouting, wriggling down the bed and I felt like I have let him down.


With everything else, unless you are fairy godmother, it takes a while for things to take effect after you have done something about. While waiting for my top up of epidural to kick in, he grabbed me (I didn't know he could be that strong), and bawled,


"Kill me..kill me please, oh shit I am shitting myself. Oh shit, shit I'm going to die".


"You're not going to do that yet sir, we won't let you, not on our shift", a laconic reply from the head scrub nurse, while she's clearing her tools covered with pooh and blood.


"Ermm he's having a do alright there doc", said Debbie,my assistant after hoicking up the blanket.


And not before long, the whole theatre was soaked with the most gagging, face screwing smell ever. I felt like throwing up.


The clock was showing 2 hours past my home time, but I couldn't leave this man in his cyclical suicidal ruminations. The epidural kicked in after 10 minutes worth of pooh smelling and wailings of the name of God in vain. He, bless him, gone quiet in a pile of pooh.


I couldn't help but noticing how an acute pain, which under this circumstances is a very good example of , must have been in the magnitude of breaking any pain chart. Must have been so unbearable that the only thing that he could say was kill me and that he wants to die.


How true that when we are hurt, the bit in the brain that gets switched on is the thoughts quadratically equating to the total relinquish of resuming life itself.


It is so subtle, unlike when you cover a candle with a glass, the fire flickered for a few salsa twist and poofed, vanished. In the latter you can see that the action of depriving oxygen, exterminate the life of a flicker of fire, in the former, it's all happening inside, not obvious to many.


When a physical component to the pain is apparent and one goes through the process of diagnosing and treating the pain, the pain more often than not, will get arrested. Emotional pain however, goes undiagnosed in our daily lives, but it's around us. We sometimes see the warnings of it.


"I feel like going to sleep and never wake up".

"Life is so unbearable, I just want to die"

"X left me and thinks I'm a slut, he never knew the truth. Maybe a handful of panadol will make him realize, when I am no longer around"


These are just examples, but there's a point in there somewhere.
Emotional pain is the worse to tackle, so I suppose understanding the matter is paramount.


Once somebody let out a cry for help, mentioning the word death and lack of zest in life because of some sort of pain, do help. It's chronic, it's not funny.


If you are part of the cause for the pain, stop whatever you're doing, trim your ego and make the pain ease.


Secondly if you have compassion, let the other person know that he/she is worth it, worth loving, worth being around with, and it'll be absurd to see him/her gone.


Thirdly, if you have passion, make love to the person, because making love is an art, a single way of displaying love in the most tailored, unjudging, most natural way and most easy to comprehend by a slowly wilting heart.


If all fail the suicidal person must have a real chemical imbalance with his/her neurotransmitters, so a visit to the shrink is prescribed. Now don't say I don't care about people in pain.