Marcus

Life from the perspective of a bedbound, medical machine supported man

The light shifts across the ceiling, day after day. It brightens the corner with the adjustable table, it spools up the side rails and the blanket until it crests his soft belly and illuminates his eyelids. He can look from one wall to the other, the light side or the dark side, but if his eyes are open the sun pools in his periphery, bringing tears. Sometimes he gives in and cries, slow fat drops that roll down his cheeks and collect in his ears. With months of practice, he can blink fiercely three times and stop the flood. No one has ever asked about the tears. A woman comes to his bedside, scrubs away the salt tracks with a scratchy washcloth. ‘Did you have a good night?’ she asks. He nods, or lets his eyes drift away from her face. 

The symphony of beeps is often his only company, either a remote nuisance or swell that blots out his consciousness, depending on where he shifts his attention. The kangaroo pump clicks and whirs as it drips nutrients directly into his stomach via a tube inserted through his abdominal wall. On good days, the tube feeds smell like cake batter. On bad days, the feeds rise up in the back of his throat like spoiled milk. He thinks good and bad days may depend on the angle of his body, if his head is high enough above the rise of his belly. He can see the pump working off to his left. He can see, on the screen, the interval of time left before it runs dry. Still, the pump is only ever changed when it shrills out its empty alarm through his room, down the hallway to the nurses’ station. Although it sounds like a five alarm fire, the nurses can take minutes to respond. He cannot fault them, he knows they are busy. 

They have worried lines on their faces, frowns, furrows of concentration. He knows they have entire lives outside this facility, as they mention overdue bills or a child’s extracurriculars. He watches them closely as they work, more entertaining than his five channel TV, but only some make eye contact and smile at him. Some only engage with his body. They put crushed medications in, they suck respiratory secretions out. They shove and pull his body around, smear cream on his bottom, wedge him against railings with pillows, wipe and tug at the tube that travels up his penis into his bladder. At these moments he is acutely aware that he is someone else’s job, a task to be completed. On good days, he feels that his purpose is to provide employment and a paycheck to these hard workers. On bad days, he is a sack of blood and bones that sucks resources from the tit of humankind. He feels drained by how draining he is on the system, a fact frequently rubbed in his face by certain late night newscasters. 

He catalogs the things that keep him alive, and the varied threats to his well being. One is the ventilator, pumping air into his body when his lungs fail to inflate themselves. This machine carries the risk of death by pneumonia, as bacteria in his mouth is pushed into his lungs by the forced air. The air has a residue, like drinking water from a plastic bottle sitting for too long under the hot sun. Is this what bacteria tastes like? The ventilator sounds many alarms, but the terrifying one is when he gets a mucus plug. Unable to clear his own airway of secretions due to a progressively weakened diaphragm, the things in his lungs build up. Tan globs push up against the opening of the tracheostomy in his throat, until he is choking on his own spit. The high pressure alarm sounds and someone runs to the bedside, threading a thin flexible tube into his throat and directly into his lungs, sucking out the secretions. It feels like getting the air knocked out of you. He is left gasping for breath afterward. It is only appropriate to suction him as needed, lest they cause trauma to his airway and his secretions become bloody. Were too much blood to drip into his stomach, he’d vomit it up, and die from asphyxiation, the blood congealing in his alveoli, blocking off air exchange. 

He is also aware of his skin, how certain bony prominences press against the plastic mattress. These areas slowly numb as one’s a*s might after sitting in one spot for too long, tingling when he is moved. The nurses tsk-tsk; his heels feel ‘boggy’, his sacral redness is ‘non-blanching’. He knows what this means. That tissue is not getting blood, thus the numbness and pain, and one day those parts of his body will die, leaving gaping wounds. These wounds also carry the risk of infection, a direct conduit for bacteria to enter his body without the barrier of his skin for protection. He has seen this in the hospital, working as a patient transporter. As he walked people down the halls, he’d glance in rooms. Piles of yellow and red gauze, clots of pus and blood stringing out from the unholy holes in their bodies. Bones glinting like treasure buried in the red muscles and yellow fat. He’d heard a story once of a man who’d had a gauze left in his wound for weeks until a nurse noticed. Tissue had grown over the gauze, locking it into the man’s healing body. When they pulled it free, blood gushed over their gloved hands, the scene of a murder. It was hard for him not to fixate on his heels and his bottom, the back of his head, the areas where he makes contact with the earth. He wishes he could hover above the bed, airborne, protected from the gravity of the situation. 

Each time he is cleaned, still in the bed, doused with lukewarm water and baby bath, someone wipes down his bladder tube. Bacteria can take this tube expressway straight to his bladder, from his bladder to his kidneys, and from there directly to his bloodstream, meaning death within hours. He involuntarily shudders in fear, squeezes his eyes shut, tries to banish the memory, but it roars back, lighting up his mind like the sun each morning. Once, he’d transported a man who was more frog than human, his eyes bulging unnaturally, his tongue protruding from his mouth, his legs contracted against his body in garish leaping fashion. He too was kept alive via tubes snaking out of orifices. Presumably his family collected his government checks, or a court-appointed guardian couldn’t give the medical directive to pull life support on a complete stranger. Once during transport the blanket was pulled to the side and he’d audibly gasped at what he saw. The nurse filled him in. The foley catheter pressed against the opening of the man’s urethra, wearing a split sore into the skin, until one fateful day when the man grabbed the tube with his toes and yanked, pulling a golf ball balloon of air out and splitting his dick open like blossoming flower petals. Those octopus tentacles on a man’s crotch haunts him, the raw beefy red inner of a man’s private parts. He consoles himself; who gives a damn if you have a working penis anyway, he’d never get to use it again. 

Is this punishment for his passive witnessing of all the suffering? He did not take action, and justice has served him this sentence, experiencing the treatments they too weathered. He closes his eyes and communes with heaven, begging for God to strike him down with fire, a deadly brain aneurysm perhaps. He counsels with the mighty Lord, o Father, forgive me - I know not what I do. He tells himself he is only human, and humans remain as ever incapable of predicting the future consequences of their actions. Had he known then what he knew now, he would astral project into the conference room where his family decided to support his life on machines indefinitely with a tracheostomy and percutaneous gastrostomy tube. Had he the chance to do something, anything… he would coat their hands with a bloody mirage, he would shriek a thousand sterile beeps. Their ears would ring forever with the piercing sounds of betrayal. How could this be love? He fears death, but death comes for him now, a perceptible tickle of mucus, a tingling in his bottom, a twinge in his bladder. It is a fearsome power to be able to keep people alive beyond their bodies’ own self sustenance, and he fears many doctors wield that power with impunity. 

If someone were to ever write a story about him, what could they possibly say? How could they end something that dragged on indeterminately, with daily changes so imperceptible it might be a glitch in the matrix, an infinite loop? He was a profit for the local hospital and now this facility, forgotten by his family, cared for… but not loved. If someone was to send a message, if he ever communicates again, would he say please, take heed, you only live once? Death comes for us all, do not run from it, God has prepared the way for you and if you shy away, this hellish existence is your punishment? Life yes, life is a blessing for those who can experience it. His life experiences now are forced on him by his machines and by others, he has no liberty and no pursuit of freedom. With these thoughts his fate bears down on him like a wave of darkness, swallowing his body. He closes his eyes and lets the inky blackness flood his consciousness, imagining this is death. 

He walks only in the chambers of his own mind, hollowed out from months of fruitless excavation, searching for a reason why. There are none to find. The hubris of humanity to keep people alive simply because they can will never be enough justification. He grapples alone with this limbo reality brought about by recent medical developments, alive but lacking autonomy and freedom. He settles on this; it can only be explained by unintended outcomes, not conscious choices. He laughs bitterly at the thought that had he completed a medical directive, he might’ve saved himself this fate; and yet, would he not have wanted everything done, then, when he thought more time was always better? He feels caked in grime, tastes the spoiled milk, swallows and the plastic tube jammed in his neck bobbles. Unable to scratch a single itch, muted, frozen in time and space. He is a product… of his time, of the times, of the system. What choice did his family have? What choice did he have now? He searches evermore for an escape, but there is none. New salty tracks on his cheeks, his only contribution to the world aside from sputum, piss and stool.