Tales of Disturbance

The Neurosurgeon

Doctor Graham Canada: husband, father, and eminent neurosurgeon was a coffee drinker by habit. Double espresso on the run. Long black on a Saturday morning. Flat white on his breaks. (If you could attribute that word "break" to the mad bathroom dashes between critically ill patients.)

Yet, driving on his way home from hospital one Tuesday evening at 6pm as the sun began to set in a pinkening sky, he approached Junction 1 and knew that tonight he would be having tea. Tea not coffee. Tea, camomile tea with lots of honey. 

He never had anything stronger on these occasions. As a neurosurgeon he saw the effects even moderate amounts of alcohol had on the brain - all too familiar as he was with the slow creep of addiction. He never partook of anything stronger on weekdays. Though he permitted himself a dram of whisky on a Friday night which he drank slowly and thoughtfully looking out at the hills that surrounded their home.

He knew he would need his wife to make his camomile tea; further, he knew he would require  it as soon as he walked in the door, and also that she would need her to be there while he drank it. He phoned her and communicated this much. "I'm coming home now" he said, "Do we have any camomile?"

Stephanie Canada on the other end of the phone knit her brow together in concern. Her husband's voice had an edge, and camomile tea she knew to be code for a bad day. The worst had likely happened in theatre. Sadly she boiled the kettle and retrieved his favourite earthware mug along with some honey from the cupboard. Thoughtfully she watched a single spoonful of honey drop slowly into the steaming liquid. 

In time her husband came home. She heard him throwing down his keys on the hall table. The crying when it came was soft at first. 

The sobs became louder and soon Dr Graham Canada was balling. He was balling for many reasons. A boy had died today under his scalpel. It was not his fault but still.

The image of the ghostly pale boy spread out on the operating table, in the midst of bleeps and wires. The nearly dead boy with his frightening marble skin. They nearly dead boy, all his years ahead of him ebbing away and being unable to save him.

Dr Canada was clinical when he was in there. He made effective decisions quickly. His work was methodical, painstaking, elegant. He was clear headed, clear sighted. He knew every part of the brain's mechanism and function - he knew as much as anyone did. 

It was afterwards that he became human. Yes the shock hit him afterwards with sledgehammer like impact. 

The hours in theatre came rushing back in a different, human language. 

The thought of the haunted look in his mother's eyes when he with his usual stammering difficulty, he finally got the news out. The memory of the sound of her wailing in the small plastic walled room with the brown chairs as understanding dawned and he could do nothing but stare at a poster about when to be worried about the colour of your urine. 

Stefan, their fourteen year old, heard the balling in the hall. People said surgeons were cold. That they were unfeeling; clinical as their scalpels. Their famous lack of empathy and people skills was why they had chosen the field in the first place. Why they were so good at it. You needed a certain amount of detachment in order to be really effective. 

But Stefan knew this had never been true of his father, a deeply sensitive man. And when he lost a patient, he felt it like a man. 

And his many tears fell, his many manly tears.

It had scared Stefan at first. The visceral, untamed manly weeping, so unlike what people expected from doctors. This could happen on any given one year on Christmas day - for gunshot wounds to the head were no respecter of Mary and Joseph, and baby Jesus, angels appearing to shepherds. Or family time when red jumpers were worn and the house smelt like fresh pine and grandparents were in abundance.  His mum had explained all this to him, emphasising the manliness of his tears. She was a psychiatrist, and privately, though he was a lot younger then, he reflected that she went into far too much detail when explaining things. 

Actually, the thing that helped the most with his Dad - well, it had worked the last time- was making him laugh. Stefan himself found humour helped everything. His father was quick-witted humourist - nobody was funnier. But when he came down a step or two and saw the doctor looking slightly grey, the lines of his face drawn tightly as if by a piece of string. Then when he saw his father throwing his thousand dollar jacket on the floor for Samson the cat to roll over, and when he looked at him unseeingly and went straight into the kitchen, he knew this time jokes would do nothing. He swallowed his joke and idled unseen back to his History homework.

Dr Graham Canada, was the most eminent neurosurgeon anywhere in his field. His speciality was gunshot wounds to the head. He often regretted that there were more of these than you would think for a small town. He believed in miracles and many times, miracles happened in his operating theatre. His patients survived. He was used to them surviving. 

But when they didn't... Dr Graham Canada had mastered almost every art in the operating theatre. But he was yet to master the art of accepting that he couldn't save everyone. 

Today, this Tuesday, the Tuesday of Hell, it had taken everything he had within him not to fall apart when announcing the news to Tyler's parents, the grieving couple shaking in shock for their child lost so suddenly, forever by a stupid hunting accident. A gun safe left unlocked by a careless cousin. An idle afternoon. The mother wailing and rocking on the floor, saying "My boy" "my boy", over and over again. 

Dr Graham Canada fell apart afterwards instead. He fell apart with Stephanie over a cup of tea that was not his habit. He leaned heavily on the old oak table, supported by his hands, one laid out on either side of his untouched camomile, his tie falling into the mug of steaming liquid, as his tears fell and spotted the old oak, and as he allowed the unbearable pain he felt for this grief stricken family to chew through his body in uncontrollable convulsions. 

He felt it as if it were him truly he did, as if it were Stefan. As if Stefan was not in his room at this moment, fully alive, humorous, precocious, cheeky, and puzzling over the megalomania of Henry the Eighth; but instead lying on a gurney in the morgue.

Dr Stephanie rubbed his back, her curled locks of auburn hair falling over his face. Eventually he raised his head and looked unseeingly at a blackbird on the windowsill; at the sun bleeding crimson behind the faraway hills. Even the hills seemed to be cringing back in reticence, in respect. 

Dr Stephanie kissed his head and put her arms around him from behind. Words were useless now, and she elected for silence. After a while she gently told him where she would be if he needed her -and left him to cry it out. 

Dr Canada had done everything right in the operating theatre. He knew this. He had done everything he could possibly have done. Tyler Jones had two gunshot wounds to the head. Still, he had operated on Tyler for more than 14 hours, doggedly keeping on going ignoring his colleague, Stephens, puzzled looks. Ignoring him even when he asked outright what he thought he was doing? Such operations had an impact on staff, on other patients in the hospital. Why keep going when it was hopeless? He knew more than Stephens did that it was no use, the child was dead, yet couldn't quite bring himself to stop.

The difference between him and Stephens though, he often reflected, was that he, Dr Graham Canada, believed in miracles, for miracles happened, miracles often happened under his scalpel. The woman with cancer who had methodically worked through her chemotherapy after his careful surgery and was out the other side, fully alive and cancer free. The teenager who had recovered from a brain tumour. When it came back and he'd operated again and he'd recovered again and was now studying in Oxford University. 

Miracles did happen, and on his watch. But not this time. Not this time.