general anaesthetic for the entire head was of raw flesh, a bland
expressionless head, a head like a child's drawing, crude lines and
harsh colours, hairless, earless, streaked and mottled with yellow runs
and patches of soft pus and corruption.
We are getting a response from the Cloxacillin, it's looking a lot
healthier, sister. The naked flesh of his eyelids had contracted,
pulling back like the glistening petals of a pink rose, exposing the
eyeballs to the air without respite. They had filled the eyes sockets
with a yellow ointment to soothe and moisten them, to keep out the
loathsome infection that covered his head. The ointment prevented
vision.
I think we'll go for an abdominal pedicel now. Will you prep for
afternoon theatre, please, sister? Now it was time for the knife, and
David was to learn that the pain and the knife lived together in
terrible sin.
They lifted a long flap of skin and flesh from his belly, leaving it
still attached at one end, and they rolled it into a fat sausage, then
they strapped his good arm, the one without the plaster cast, to his
side and they stitched the free end of the sausage to his forearm,
training it to draw its blood supply from there. Then they brought him
back from theatre and left him trussed and helpless and blind with the
pedicel fastened to his arm, like a remora. to the belly of a shark.
Well, we have saved both eyes, the voice was proud, fond almost, and
David looked up and saw them for the first time. They were gathered
around his cot, a circle of craning heads, mouths and noses covered by
surgical masks, but his vision was still smeary with ointment and
distorted by the drip irrigation that had replaced it. Now we will go
for the eyelids. It was the knife again, the contracted and
bunchedelids split and re-shaped and stitched, the knife up ey and pain
and the familiar sickly taste and stink of anaesthetic that saturated
his body and seemed to exude from the very pores of his skin.
Beautiful, really lovely, we have cleaned up the infection nicely. Now
we can begin. The head was cleansed of its running rivers of pus, and
now it was glistening and wet, bald and bright red, the colour of a
cocktail cherry as granulation tissue formed. There were two gnarled
and twisted flaps for ears, the double row of teeth startlingly white
and perfect where the lips had been eaten away, a long white blade of
exposed bone outlined the point of the jaw, the nose was a stump with
the nostrils like the double muzzles of a shotgun, and only the eyes
were still beautiful, dark indigo and flawlessly white between lids of
shocking crimson and neatly laid back stitches.
We'll begin at the back of the neck. Will you prep for this afternoon's
theatre, please, sister? It was a variation on the theme of the knife.
They planed sheets of live skin from his thighs and meshed them to allow
a wider spread, then they laid them over the exposed flesh, covering a
little at each session, and evaluating each attempt while David lay in
his cot and rode the long swells of pain.
That one is no good. I'm afraid we will have to scrap it and try again.
While his thighs grew a new crop of skin, they planed fresh sheets from
his calves, so that each donor-site became a new source of pain.
