Murderers, all of us. Murderers.
That’s why I chewed so many Xanax. You have to be numb. How else are you to survive it all? She looked just like Rakgadi Juice. And worse, she trusted me. I’m the one who convinced her to sign the consent form. To Dr. Voel-Vfamba, she was bed A3, the cardiac failure in bed A3. It was my job to protect her from him, from all of them, all those vultures, those third-year students with their logbooks desperate for signatures, signatures at any cost. I should have protected her from the registrars who sought nothing else but to clear the ward so they could study for their exams, from the specialists with papers to write. “A rare case of drug-induced cardiomyopathy in an elderly black female.” But I didn’t save her. Instead I aided and abetted, facilitated, won her over—and then handed her over. And now she’s dead.
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I want to cry, but it takes too much time, too much energy. I want to run away, to escape, but to where?
Escaping requires planning, thinking, organizing. I feel like I am drowning in myself. Is that possible? To drown in the blood coursing through your own veins? I feel like the air in my lungs is choking me. Like there is a small me inside the big me that is sinking, struggling. Somewhere deep inside of me there is a thing in need of saving. Something in there is in trouble. It is screaming, it is gasping, it is dying.
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Sister Agnes was furious at us. She didn’t think the procedure was necessary, and had said a number of times that Mrs. Mazibuko should be discharged and allowed to go home and spend her last days with her family. But the specialists had insisted. What choice did we have? I heard Sister Agnes later say to one of the matrons that these were the kinds of things that made her want to take her retirement package and go watch her grandchildren play at her feet.
“They are children. They think like children and they behave like children. They may know books, but nothing else. I’m sure some of them haven’t even started menstruating yet.”
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I blame the barrel. It’s not me. The barrel was rotten to begin with, before I got into it. I’m a good apple, really I am. The barrel made me rotten, rotten to the core.
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Who said we had to enjoy caring for the ill? I mean, one ought to do it, it’s morally right to do it, but do you have an obligation to enjoy it? Would it make you a bad person if you said you detested it? Hated every minute of it? Did it, but deplored it?
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Sometimes I want to feel stuff. I’m doing a resuscitation and I know I should feel something, but I don’t know how to anymore. There’s something in me that’s blocked, that’s stuck. There’s a weight on my chest, and I try to breathe it off, but I can’t. So when the patients die, I am relieved. I tell myself it’s better for them to die. They’re suffering, they’re in pain. I try to justify it. I’m tired, Lord. I’m tired of seeing them every day, tired of seeing their faces. I’m tired of being reminded of how little I can do. I’m tired of the drips that keep coming out. I’m tired of seeing them eat their poo and drink their pee. I’m tired of seeing them go mad. I’m tired of watching their families come every day and look to me for answers I cannot give them. I’m tired of working with people who don’t care, who are dead like me. I can’t even remember why I did this in the first place, why I was so foolish to think that being a doctor, that six years at medical school, would bring me happiness. All it’s brought me is pain and confusion.
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I don’t know how I expected “doing good” to feel. But I didn’t think it would be like this. There’s no magic, no divine enlightenment. It’s as hard as doing bad. You’re just as tired, just as scared, just as disillusioned, just as broken. I thought there was supposed to be some sort of anointing, some filling of the Holy Spirit, some peace that would come with doing God’s work. But there’s none of that.
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When Jesus told the Twelve that he knew one of them was going to betray him, was he hoping that once that one realized he knew, he would change his ways and repent from his evil? And if not, if Jesus knew it was all inevitable, how unfair to Judas that he had no way out, that he was predestined to be forever known as the traitor of the Son of God.
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Why is this place so broken? Why did You let it get so bad? Why don’t You do something about it? I don’t want to be a part of it, of this.
