Mirror, mirror

vivianimbriotis | Sept. 17, 2025, 1:03 p.m.

When I arrived, in all the ways that mattered, you dad was dead. His pupils were fixed and dilated. He was breathing, but not well. We had a miraculous device on his finger that shone two wavelengths of light through his tissues, analysed the ratio of their absorbances over time, and told me that only three-quaters of his haemoglobin molecules had oxygen bound to them.

I cried out to him. He did not respond. There was not enough person-stuff left for him to respond. His lungs were broken beyond medical science's ability to repair them, and the broken lungs had broken his brain (where the human person is). I felt calm. I felt detached. I was in control.

We put a mask on him - a non-rebreathing reservoir mask, the same mask I removed from my father's lifeless face two years ago. We gave some drugs, considered some imaging. All his numbers, fed back to us by these miraculous machines, were getting worse. We considered placing him on a ventilator, but there is indignity and suffering in the ventilator. I called a senior doctor, and then another, and another. Consensus: no ventilator.

Miraculous machines, miraculous drugs. But never any miracles.

By the time you arrived, I knew your dad was going to die. I had been told - "warned" - that you were a doctor. A mid-level monkey like me, working in the grease and grime of the hospital-machine.

I didn't know how to talk to you. I tried to walk the line between treating you like a clever colleague and a normal family member. I wanted to invite you to question me, but not require you to perform the doctor. I wanted to make it okay. But still, I was cool and collected. I was in control.

You were terribly, terribly reasonable. You were like me. You looked much more together than I ever do; almost suave, completely out of keeping with the sitation. You looked like a beautiful man hollowed out. Another doctor with a dead dad. I wanted to tell you that - to make you not so alone. I wanted to ask, "Hey, after your dad's body is taken to the morgue, do you want to grab a coffee and compare notes?"

I made sure you didn't have to take the oxygen mask off his face. I made sure he got enough morphine to saturate his mu receptors, so that anything left of him was incapable of feeling pain. I was in control: of his pain, of the agenda of his death.

I didn't hug you. I didn't cry. Finally, with you and your family settled at the bedside - my pointless echocardiogram finished, my drug orders all legally signed, all conversations over, I walked out - in control, icy - and cried in the tearoom. Both of us have dead dads, now.

Details changed for anonymity (except mine).