WHAT’S THE ICU IN A TRAUMA CENTER GOT TO DO WITH IT?
Recently my 85 year old dad was involved in an accident that resulted in two skull fractures, severe head laceration and bleeding on the brain and brain stem. He was rushed by ambulance 50 miles to a regional trauma center.
Upon arrival the pouring laceration was stapled and sutured as an MRI was done on his brain. In in all he was administered 4 units of whole blood and a pack of platelets, then placed in ICU.
As I type this out, it is five days since the accident. While the characters materialize from each key stroke, he is in a room on the step-down floor after only three days in ICU. The internal head hemorrhaging healed on its own. He has been cleared neurologically and will be coming home soon. There’s need for a little home health care and physical therapy, but he’s gonna be alright.
After spending round-the-clock hours with him in ICU and step down, what came to me regarding a free and natural existence? Basically, that all there is is just that when all of the window dressings and attachments one knows as her/his “life” vaporizes in the bright light of basic physical continuation of the human body.
Mentally, dad’s memory of before the accident and where he was, as in the hospital, the day of the week and such was good. Three days after the accident he suffered from “residual” effects(like a delayed reaction from the hard knock on the head) and had about a 24 hour bout with a lot of confusion. Thankfully, that subsided and he’s doing well now.
What I witnessed was a human being having to deal with bathroom issues being confined to a bed, feeding himself with a fork or spoon, dealing with a King-Kong-headache and just plain frill-less being right where he was physically and circumstantially.
What this key-pecker seeks to accomplish in this and other posts is to present glimpses of happenstances and experiences that lift the lid off of all the covers over our lives that can mask and even lead us to forget our basic nature; stripped down and reverted to as we were born. And there may be posts here and there of something or other that occurs to me every now and then, while walking the dog or such.
Sometimes we have knock-the-cover-off-the-baseball licks as in my dad’s experience. Or, we might come to revelation from a steady process of observations. Whatever the case, primordially, the breath you just took IS your existence. Not your 401-K, hairstyle, physical possessions; no, just one in-and-out breath.
Is it okay to have “things” and such, though? Of course, though that’s not for me nor anyone else to say. Heck, it’s the society that we live in lest we be one of the Discovery Channel folk living in and off the wilderness. But no matter, reduced to the aboriginal level we are all one free-and-independent existence.
~ Jackson
