A gut feel of pain

It was meant to be an hour long 'exploratory' abdominal surgery- they didn't know what exactly was wrong.

The X-rays did not reveal the cause of the steady decline, the green aspirate, the abstinence which made the Doctor's advice of Nil Per Oral so totally redundant, listless eyes which had aged over that week of suffering and had gone beyond pain, the scooped out hollows which constantly asked but one question- how long the torture would continue, how much more the shrivelled body had to bear its burden of shallow breath.

They wanted the mother to be there till he 'went down' under anaesthesia and to be around when he came to. So all there in the green pant suits and green caps set about their work like so many workers in a green-uniformed factory, all working on that tiny body under strong lights. You can leave now and wait in the recovery room of the OT for about an hour, they said.

They cut in to realise the extent of internal damage, the rotten portions of gut to be cut cleanly without spilling any of the lethal toxicity it had acquired, and then the subsequent stitching of the gut with each vessel being matched and patched together like a complex but vital jigsaw puzzle. Anastamosis is not an easy job!

They worked fast and furiously, staunching the blood, topping the anaesthesia, introducing appropriate levels of morphine, checking on vitals.

They were half way done before they realised the enormity of the exercise. There is just so much of anaesthesia that 12 kilos of body weight can take. They would lose him if more topping up was done and the option was to do the actual stapling when he was 'coming to'.

Someone needs to hold him, to calm him - not only to mitigate the pain which the morphine was unable to deal with but to deal with the mute terror in those eyes which accused the world much more sharply than the piercing shriek, like that of a lamb at slaughter.

The hard nosed professionals that they all were- handpicked for such eventualities, they had to call in the mother again.

Later, much later, in the ICU the anaesthetist came in to check. But she did not look at the post-operative patient at all. She looked at me, one mother to another, and said, It isn't easy being a mother, is it? I looked down at the exhausted bandaged bloodied bag of bones, tubes, pipes and monitors which was precariously clutching at me, pulling on my heart strings just much as yanking at my hair. I saw an intrepid spirit there, a physical manifestation of Life itself, dry heaving and wracked in a terrified, traumatised, irregular tattoo of tachycardic breath. I wished to take away all that pain through those fluttering kisses lightly touching his hair.

But her eyes pleaded with me, beseeching me to forgive her for hurting my baby. I transferred the teensiest-weensiest bit of my attention to her. She was in tears. She, the doctor and me, the mother of the sick baby. The roles reversed completely.

The words came gushing out and she started telling me how it hurt her to see her juvenile diabetic daughter suffer and how being a mother is so tough. As the tears flowed, the words came out faster. I was holding her hand (didn't know I had a hand to spare) and comforting her much as gently as I was stroking my baby and as strongly as I was telling myself that it would all be OK.