A Doctor

Her phone rang an hour after he had left home. On the other end of the line, someone told her that her beloved husband was involved in a car crash and was extremely critical.

She rushed to the hospital and started looking for him. The medical authorities did not have anyone registered under her husband’s name, so she combed every department of the hospital for hours.

Amid the chaos, she finally found him lying in an emergency ward. He was in dire straits, but still breathing.

In came the doctor, perhaps one of the finest in the city. He looked at the patient, bloodied with severe cuts, and made a horrible sight. He then looked at her. Giving her an assuring look, he asked the nurses to take her away.

"Oh my dear, how many hours have you been bleeding alone? Is this what you deserve?" the doctor mumbled.

The doctor immediately took matters into his own hands, transfusing 12 units of blood and infusing more than 100 saline solution units.

The patient was stabilized, but the windshield glass that penetrated his neck had hit his spinal cord, rendering him quadriplegic and leaving him with respiratory and intestinal paralysis.

The patient's spirits were as high as the sky, while her spirits were as low as the ground. She would have a look at her husband through the small glass opening in the intensive care unit, go back to the waiting room and break down in tears.

After 10 days at the hospital, all the relatives who visited him agreed that his condition was irreversible, especially given the severity of his injuries, where a lot of internal injuries had led to immense blood loss and complications.

Despite this, the doctor did not lose hope. He still had a little hope of saving his life, or he hoped to be able to do that. He would try not to look at the wife, as that made him weak. His relentless efforts did bring some desired results. Miraculously, the patient regained consciousness.

He and he began communicating through eye contact: the patient would blink to say "yes" and raise his eyebrows to signify "no."

"I will be happy even with only your eyes with me, even without your body," the doctor said to himself, perhaps out of relief. "I do not ask for more."

Soon, the two devised a more elaborate system of communication. The doctor would recite the alphabet, and the patient would blink when he reached the desired letter, slowly spelling out his sentences.

The doctor would warmly encourage his patient through rehabilitation exercises. Some sessions were filmed and sent to the wife, assuring her that he would be back.

"One more time, do you want to get out of here?" the doctor would say, holding his patient’s hand as the young man would blink once for "yes".

In a month’s time, he made a slow but promising recovery in the hospital. The doctor was checking on everything, even his breath. He would massage him for hours every day until he noticed that the patient was trying to move his neck.

The patient eventually regained his sense of smell and was able to defecate and speak again. He also moved the muscles in his stomach and thigh, and was even able to move his knee a bit.

The doctor could not believe the great improvements made by his patient. Neither could the wife!

"We will not go back home until you can stand on your feet." She whispered in her husband’s ears while tears rolled down her cheeks.

"I want to stand up. I want to walk," was his desperate answer.

But just as his condition looked hopeful, his health took a drastic turn for the worse.

A surgery to insert a tube into his neck to help him breathe did not go as planned, causing an abnormal connection between his esophagus and windpipe - and a drug-resistant bacterial infection.

This made it impossible for him to eat. The doctor watched helplessly as his patient withered away, knowing that he was hungry and thirsty yet unable to satisfy these basic needs. The doctor and his team put in every effort possible to improve his health, but with every effort, his condition worsened.

The wife had been exhausted by now. Her faith in her hopes and even her prayers was dwindling. She gave a blank look to the doctor. A look that had despair written all over it.

Slightly more than two months after the accident, the patient succumbed to his injuries.

The hospital staff broke this news to the wife and the family, who by now were prepared for this. The wife was let in the room to have a last look at her husband. She saw him and broke down.

"You know, when he breathed his last, he hadn't seen a single tear from my eye," the doctor said, standing beside her. "When I was with him, I held myself together completely. And I was strong, very strong. And I'm really happy about this, that he never saw me cry. " He continued. "As doctors, we are not supposed to be emotionally attached to our patients, but as a father who had to see his young son dying a slow death is....," saying that, he burst into tears. The little fingers that he had held once while teaching him how to walk, now lie lifeless, and so does the heart rate monitor!

A doctor just lost his patient, and a father lost his son!