Writing from the Body week 2

Fingertips

They arrive on the bay with due status, as if a fanfare has blown. It’s the ward round. The Consultant, his Registrars, and in the rear,  the student doctors, one anxiously carrying a sheaf of papers whilst attempting to make notes of the words the Great God Consultant will  pronounce. All the faces gather around her bed – they don’t make any eye contact with her, look only at the torso as the nurses pull back the dressings. He pulls his disposable gloves on, and then uses his fingertips to poke around in her revealed insides, where the skin has gone, and open interior gapes.

‘See’ he says, pointing, ‘this thickening here means the wound is beginning to close from below, from the inside out. We have to hope that no infections is sealed in underneath.’

‘Hope’, she thinks. ‘We have to hope.’ Is that the best she can be offered?

‘Trust me’, his body language insists, ‘I am the God Consultant and I know what I’m doing’. And underneath she detects a small hint of fear, of not being in control anymore. That he knows, as she senses, that this could go either way – the body has its own agenda to heal or decay, and now he’s finishes cutting it about, he will no longer have any power over it.

He’s lost interest in her now he’s saved her life. His job is done. These messy consequences of his surgery are for the nursing staff, the wound team, who do treat her as a person, gently, and with care and sympathy. She has more faith in their reassurances that things will get better, will improve over time, than faith in the God consultant who has already left for a more interesting case…..

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