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Sep.7,2016We walk back together, adopting the folded arms stance of two men talking mechanicals, and sure enough…there it hung.
So I turn to him, and tell him the following tale:Â Â
“When I was a wee lad of 17, I worked for a summer as a courier in a hospital. My job was to take stuff that was here but needed to be there. Usually it was supplies, or paperwork, or sample, etc but once in a while they needed a person pushed. I was the pusher.
So one fine morning they call me to the ER to push a bed with a patient in it. As it turns out, he was a motorcycle rider who had crashed into a brick wall. My job was to push while the emergency trauma team fixed and held him together on the way to the operating room.
So I started pushing. There was bustling, and beeping, and the strained chatter of professional tested to the limits of their skills working together. I sensed the import of the moment, hunkered down in determined silence and did my part. I pushed that bed.
When we got to the relative lull of the elevator, I took a moment to take in the moment before me. Slowly, as impossible scenes do, I realized that the patient’s eyeball was lying on the pillow beside him, dangling by what I could only assume was the optic nerve.
I told the gas station attendant all this, and said “you don’t forget something like that easily”.
I had been looking dolefully at the dangling light during all this, but at this moment I looked back at him. His face was pale, his mouth agape. He stood transfixed, aghast with the horror he had not seen coming.
My work here was finished, it was time to travel on.
