The Mechanics of Us

Chapter 2

A lot can change in five seconds. You learn early on in med-school that five seconds can determine the fate of a person's life. Whether or not they will be able to breathe on their own or if they will need to be put on a ventilator for the rest of their life and if they will be able to walk or will need to be in a wheelchair. Or if their heart will stop beating or if it will keep going. Five seconds is all it takes to start chest compressions to save a person's life—just five seconds.
I won't forget the look on the woman's face when she noticed me standing still with an unphased expression. Why couldn't I? Why was my body stalling? Why could I not react for the first five seconds? Time seemed to pass in chopped up moments, starting when I saw the young girls bloodied, bruised, mangled, and macerated body. Her hair was strawberry red, her skin a pink pale, and she was so young, not even three years old. A nurse tapped me on my shoulder, and I flinched as an electric current shot through my body, which finally triggered the reaction I needed to get my mind working and the blood finally pulsing through my veins. I only took two strides before I was at the young girl's side. She was conscious, startled though, her eyes kept darting from one person to the next, and her breathing was shallow and rapid. However, she stayed silent, most likely from shock, and her extensive piercing electric blue eyes caught sight of mine and stared straight up at me. I felt her sticky blood coated hand touch mine, and I instinctively held it tight. Suddenly, an indescribable emotion overcomes me, a yearning almost, but there were also bits of sorrow; I have never had this happen before.
I vacantly heard a nurse shout at me that the girl's blood pressure was dropping, and as I looked her over it, all I could think about was how she resembled a body that was put in a blender since all of her limbs were lacerated and stretched out in odd angles. One of her hands was torn almost completely off, and it now dangled at her side, holding on by a rope of veins and tendons. Then the blood started to collect in pools around her body, it was as if she was swimming in it, and when she made any subtle movement, a crimson stream would trickle over the edge of the bed and onto the floor. Her hand that was once holding mine so tightly began to go limp. Panic began to swell inside of me and the moments that followed; I don't recall. It was as if I was watching myself on television. I saw me flailing my arms, poking random tubes into the girl's arms, I noticed me opening and closing my mouth rapidly commanding orders but I don't hear what I say. All I could do was watch from a distance and hope that I knew what I was doing.
Then as quickly as I was watching myself, I somehow managed to regain my body once more and no longer saw myself from the outside. I hadn't realized it since I was frantically moving and my attention was elsewhere, but the parents were standing at the foot of the bed, they each shared Shiney drained eyes and rosy cheeks stained with fresh tears. Unfortunately, they were witnessing me at my worst, and on top of that, they were watching their daughter die right before their eyes.
Pensively I made my way over to the nurse who was attaching various solution bags to the hanger opposite of where I stood. I leaned down and covered my lips next to her ear and whispered-"She's too unstable to move," and I watched as charcoal black, purple, and red liquids ran their way down the IV tubes and into the girl's right hand. They should work, as they are polar to the chemicals in the human body and thus react more quickly. But even after the first minutes, which is the time it usually took for them to work, her blood pressure continued to drop, and her hand started turning black and blue, which meant narcroses was setting in.
It's always challenging to make individual judgment calls about amputating a limb since there are instances it could be saved. However, when infected tissue starts to spread, the infection could kill the person. I relied on my judgment here, and hesitantly I leaned over the girl, waved my hand for the nurse to do the same and hastily whispered-"Okay, the hand has to go. It's going to release pathogens into the blood. Her spine seems to be crushed too. She won't be able to walk again. But before we can fix those, we need to get this bleeding under control."
Reflecting on it, my voice didn't sound like my own. Usually, my voice has limited range, robotic, unwavering, but as I talked to the nurse, my voice possessed hints of fear, worry, and desperation.
I glanced over at the parents that still stood before me; their bodies seemed tense and stiff with the man holding the woman in his arms, the woman cradled the man's arms around her. I sucked in a deep breath and, with tired eyes, stared at the parents, but that quickly became too much for me, and so my eyes cast down to my hands. It hadn't occurred to me that they were stained with their daughters' blood, and I frantically shoved them in my coat pockets, which wasn't much better as it was also stained with her blood.
I let out a long sigh and then crane my neck up; I peered up at them with pleading eyes and a slack-jawed expression
. "We are doing all we can. What happened?-" I glanced from one pair of eyes to the other, and the mother was the one first to speak. I will never forget how broken her voice was. How childish and worried it sounded. She loved her daughter. More than I have ever seen before. She told me that her daughter was playing with their cat when it wandered off into the street, and the daughter followed. She got hit at fifty miles an hour by a car.
It was only for five seconds her parents didn't know where she went, and within that five seconds, her life began to dwindle. It was five seconds that I stalled because I couldn't focus enough and compose myself in time to stabilize the young girl. Now she is dying behind me with the medicine not healing her as it should because the damage was too severe, and I waited too long. Not to mention, if she lived, she would not be able to walk, not have a hand, might be cognitively delayed, her bones pummeled into fragments so she will not be able to use these limbs fully. Everything happened within five seconds, and it all happened because of me. I realized then that I needed to get those five seconds back.