Golden Penda

vivianimbriotis | April 1, 2026, 7:49 p.m.

The first and last thing I noticed about her was her smile. 

The three of us stool outside the glass sliding door into her room: myself, the consultant intensivist, and the night registrar. I was diminutive and flamboyant, the consultant was a stone weathered by time and storm into something unbreakable, and the night registrar was just tired.

The patient was smiling at us through the glass. I listened vaguely to the stream of consciousness handover from the night registrar - something about a us giving her a trickle of intravenous herbicide. She was very young - perhaps not in absolute terms, but certainly in ICU terms.

I gently slid the door open and slipped inside. I sat on the side of her bed, a bird perched awkwardly. "Hi," I said. "My name is Viv. I'm one of the ICU doctors."

"I'm Tina," she said, still smiling. 

We talked in the disconnected way doctors sometimes talk to patients. Yes, she had pain. Yes, it was tolerable with her current mix of drugs. No, she wasn't nauseated, nor short of breath.

"Okay," I said, "Do you mind if I examine your belly?"

"No," she replied. She was still smiling but I detected something beneath it, some fragility. She was sea foam, gossamer.

I exposed her belly and saw them - six or seven bamboo shoots, emerging from the right side of her abdomen. I brushed my fingers over them, eliciting a slight wince. 

"I'll have to remove these. It might sting a little," I said. "It's your body. You're in control. If you want me to stop, let me know."

She closed her eyes and leaned back in the upright hospital bed. "Okay," she breathed.

I snapped on a pair of sterile gloves and slowly, carefully worked the offending vegetative matter loose. She breathed throughout it. 

"You're a champion, Tina," I said as I walked out of the room. I remember thinking that she was so equanimous and careful. She was like my friends. She was like me.

"Those will grow out of control," my consultant said. I looked at the handful of shoots in my hand. They looked okay to me. "Mm," I said noncommittally, and threw them away in a yellow clinical waste bin.

The next time I came to see her, it was James and me standing outside her room. James is my age, an ICU nurse tall and dark-haired. He asked me how she was doing. "Her bloods looks a bit worse," I said. I slid the door open noiselessly.

The weeds were back. I walked to the bedside, murmuring soft greetings, and saw them coming out of and old central line site on the right side of her neck. I saw another growing from her right ear.

I called James in, and with his help fully scrubbed - first I washed my hands, then gently wrapped myself in gown and gloves and had James complete the dance, twirling me until the irradiated-material covered me from head to toe - cleaner than clean.

"I'm going to take these out again," I said. "Because they're a bit bigger, I'm going to use some local anaesthetic." 

"Oh," she said, her face held in that fragile smile.

"The anaesthetic is the only part that will hurt - it feels like a small ant bite. I promise."

The silence stretched as I prepared my sterile field.

"James," I said, "could I ask you for a huge favour?" I glanced at Tina, partly embarrassed and partly conspiratory - "Could you push my glasses up my nose? They're about to fall off." 

"Of course," James said, laughing slightly. Tina also laughed. Yes!

"Does that ever happen to you, Tina?" I asked, and she nodded, giggling. "I've had the same frames for a decade, Tina, and they've been slightly too big for me the whole time."

"You need wrap-around sunglasses," she said. 

"Indoors?" James chimed in.

The young bamboo was too long to fit into the bin, so I had to break it down into shorter segments over my knee.

The next time it was just myself outside her door - James off on a sanctioned break, the consultant transiently vanished for some meeting. I skimmed her notes. The weed specialists had been by, and said that they could chop out all the germinating seeds, but it probably would not make much difference. They had left the choice to her. "She wants to talk to you," one of the other nurses had told me. Me specifically?

I crept inside to find mature black bamboo ascending from her abdomen to the ceiling, vine roots growing beneath her fingernails.

"The weed people came today..." she began.

"Yes," I said, "I know, I read their note. The think uprooting the seeds will be dangerous, and might not work."

"They asked me to decide."

"Yes. It's a hard decision."

"What should I do?" She asked, with that ungentle smile. I was silent a while.

"I don't know," I said eventually, feeling wretched even as I said it. "Both are reasonable." Something flashed beneath that smile.

"What would you do?"

"I'm not sure. I've never been in this position."

"Neither have I!" she said, and we both huffed at the little joke.

We were silent for a while. Eventually, I said,

"I would let it grow, I think."

"Oh..."

She never made that decision. Over the next day she became more and more insensate. When she was hardly speaking any more, a nurse handed me a phone with a relative on the other end. "She wants an update," they said. 

"Hi," I intoned into the phone. I was standing on the other side of the glass from the terrarium. The bamboo had matured and multiplied, and the vines grown around some of the poles with trefoil leaves. I found it hard to speak. "My name is Viv. I'm an ICU doctor. Why don't you tell me what you already know and I'll fill in the gaps."

She was Tina's sister in law, and what she knew what not very much. She did not know Tina was sick. 

"I'm very sorry. She has days left at most," I said. I never said that she was always anxious, always smiling, never cried.

"Oh."

We stopped removing the weeds, but we had to trim the vine leaves out of the way just to attach the ECG electrodes. Eventually, we just stopped attaching those, too. We kept a gentle stream of herbicide running into a drip in her arm, though. 

James pulled me aside.

"Aren't we doing harm?" he asked. "Shouldn't we stop the weedkiller?"

I didn't know. Was keeping her alive, insensate, doing her some abstract harm even in the absence of pain? Were we violating some preexisting preference of hers, uncommunicated to us?

Eventually, instructed to do so by on high, I waded through the knee-length underbrush to stop the weedkiller. She exhaled breaths, deeper then shallower the deeper again, and with them a shimmering pollen.

I stumbled out of the room and was met with the bright and well-rested face of the night registrar. "Ready to handover?" she asked.

We walked in our circle and I did my best to recall the other patients. I did a poor job. I could think only of Tina. James padded towards us slowly.

"Viv," he said softly, "she's died."

"Oh." That was fast. Suddenly, my face felt hot. I opened my mouth and could not speak.

"Hand it over. Go home," the night registrar said.

"No, it's okay. I'll do this one."

I was unable to open door at first because of well-adhered clovers. I had to wrench it open, then tripped forward onto uneven ground. The room was dominated by a towering cluster of black bamboo at the center, each cane as thick around as my head. The room was a forest. Pea and clover trailed the walls, and ferns grew in from the air conditioning ducts, waving their fronds over proceedings. Flowers blooms from the vines, from branches of trees that cracked the linoleum tiles, and the flowers were adorned with fuzzed bumblebees. Dragonflies darted, and by my foot a grasshopper leaped.

I fought my way through the underbrush and saw her. Though her face was fully slack, and no oxygen animated her muscles, a lifetime of tissue memory had left the corners of her lips slightly upturned. I gently closed her eyes.

With a stethoscope, I listened to her chest and heard only the transmitted rustling of the leaves.

On my way out, a drooping bough covered in yellow flowers blocked my path.

Seized by something, I darted to the wall, where beneath the overgrowth I knew a metal trolley lay. I tore away stems and rootlets, and found eventually a pair of old sterile scissors, now rusted half away. With them, I took a cutting of the branch, and clutching it exited the room.

The night registrar was waiting outside. "What's that for?" she asked. 

"Oh," I said, looking down at the golden flowers, "I'm not sure yet."