Cardiac Ballet

 

Paul Radcliffe  

       

 

           Hospitals are endless drama and occasional comedy. Some patients die. Others try very hard to do so. They linger in the borderlands, between life and death. Ventilators breathe. Drugs maintain blood pressure, keeping them alive. Some injuries are unsurvivable. Justice didn’t apply. Inattention did. Paul was taking a call. He stepped into the road. Please leave a message. A speeding car struck him. Intensive care delayed the inevitable. He was brain dead. Hope died on impact.

       Paul was comatose. The subject of organ donation was raised. The organ retrieval team were contacted. The ventilator sighed. Above Paul, leads stretched to monitors recording vital signs. Endless pirouettes of the cardiac ballet. Paul’s blood pressure was  maintained. To ensure this, a thin line was placed in an artery. This was attached to a transducer, rendering pressure into waveform. It curved across the screen. Red. Hypnotic. Numbers flickered. The waveform wavered. Becoming words.

      Car coming. Black now. Everything dark. Where is the light? Where is the light?

       The monitor chimed. The blood pressure wave was regular, the numbers within acceptable limits. The retrieval team arrived. The family said farewells. The  cardiac ballet danced. Paul was taken to the operating theatre.

        In Intensive Care, a printer is attached to the monitors. Alarms are retrieved and printed for later scrutiny. Paul’s nurse prepared the empty bedspace. She passed the printer, picking up papers. She turned one over. It bore Paul’s name. Further down, a printed  screenshot. A red, curving trace. Beneath it, there were questions.

        Where is the light? Where is the light?

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        Paul Radcliffe is an Emergency RN. In the past, he worked in an area where children were sometimes afflicted with sickness of Gothic proportions. Some are ghosts now. As a child he visited an aunt in a haunted farmhouse. This explains a lot. Paul has worked in a variety of noisy places unlikely to be on anyone’s list of holiday destinations. He is also a highly suggestible subject for any cat requiring feeding and practicing hypnosis.

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       Hillary Lyon founded and for 20 years acted as senior editor for the independent poetry publisher, Subsynchronous Press. Her horror, speculative fiction, and crime short stories, drabbles, and poems have appeared in more than 150 publications. She's an SFPA Rhysling Award nominated poet. Hillary is also the art director for Black Petals.