My brain had no precedent for what it registered beyond the
curtain – lightning exploded behind my eyes, thunder numbed my hearing, my
gorge rose, my anus shriveled and I clutched the flimsy curtain to stay
upright. Head buried in my shoulder, I
peeked again, from the corner of my eye, with the same results. “Stop doing that!” my brain shrieked, but no
logic can overpower morbid curiosity. The
man in the bed was alone, unconscious, on life support, and had been roughly,
agonizingly skinned.
If an
elderly person with friable, papery skin falls and tears their arm or leg in
such a way that the skin rolls up like a stocking, the medical term is “de-gloving”;
this was no mere de-gloving, this looked like Buffalo Bill was making another
suit. Every inch of this young man, from
neck to feet, was a flaky dull red, except the yellowish tendons connecting
exposed muscle to bone. It was
horrifying, and fascinating, like an anatomy textbook come to life. There’s the iliopsoas! And the tensor fasciae
latae! I shivered to imagine the pain he’d
be in if he was awake. Perhaps that’s
why he wasn’t – perhaps the brain switched to default mode when this torture
ceremony occurred? I went in search of
answers.
He’d
been shut down for five days, his nurse told me, as if he was a cyborg, and
truly it was easier to relate to him if your reeling brain quickly shoved him
into that category. He’d been at a
friend’s house watching football, knocking back a few. When the game finished he straddled his
motorcycle and ripped down the curvy gravel road toward home, only making a few
miles of progress before an aggressive turn dumped him through a barbed-wire
fence, into a weedy field. He lay
unconscious and unfound for three days, during which interval a nest of fire
ants discovered him and leisurely harvested his tender bits for the winter. His family couldn’t stand to visit his
hospital bed. I couldn’t blame them – I barely
could and I was being paid for it!
He died
two days later, alone, the ventilator and heart monitors beeping forlornly. It’s hard to say what killed him,
ultimately, there’s so many choices – sepsis, kidney failure, electrolyte
imbalance, hypotension, toxin build-up. I
think we have to blame the fire ants – they STOLE HIS SKIN, for their own
selfish survival. Who’s on top of the
food chain now, PETA?
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