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“None so blind”
Perry Estelle © 2002
"Ven voz the lass time you had your eyes looked at, Dr Kubelik?" The ophthalmic optician gave an inviting gesture and swung a swivel chair across brown vinyl in the direction of the letter card. She was a bony female with a short black bob. She had green eyes and a brittle click of an Austrian accent. The sort that ended up in an omelette of cheesy Californian twang. As she flipped through a selection of lenses she held them up to the light like a suspect hand of cards.
"Its been the third test this month….I have a friend in the hospital ….he advised that I get my eyes checked…..he…..I mean…..I need to be fit to…."
Levon was now aware that maybe his eyes were not the problem but his mouth was in need of emergency treatment just to enable him to string a sentence together. He followed the expressionless wisp of a woman around her clinic. She was professional and he noticed how methodically she worked. Her erect posture. A jewel free pair of elegant hands that worked the giant slit-lamp microscope. A lump of engineering that had more metal in it than the 'Belgrano'. An eye examination apparatus that looked like a time-machine out of Babylon-5. A clumsy, yet crucial chunk of hardware that can diagnose what is wrong with those amazing web-cams in the front of our head.
"Vot do you practizz, Dactor." Levon winced at the overtired expression directed to people like him in the top one percent earning bracket. He did not 'practice' anything. Only squash and photography. He concluded that it was somehow ironic that people would happily go to a dental 'practice' to have teeth pulled. Hardly inspiring, when a brass plaque suggests the person named is only 'practicing'. He was a health professional and hated the term practitioner. When taking his car to the garage for a service he did not insult the mechanic by asking 'how long have you been practicing?' Molegrips shoved sideways up his nose would be the response, he guessed. Levon wanted to tell the woman in the very least detail and now had managed some throat clearance.
He was flustered into a muck sweat. He was used to avoiding photographers at airports. He had been interviewed by every prestigious cable network, internationally. He had dragged neuro surgery to the land of Canaan via the World Health Organisation and here was this second generation immigrant (something he forgot he was also) talking to him like he was a snotty nosed jumped up, never come down, know nothing, boy scout.
There was no excuse for her not to recognise him, unless she was inspecting his 'gable end' for 'Nuremberg trials'. No excuse, when she did not know a famous brain surgeon even when his face was jammed in a vice three centimetres from hers. Who really needed their eyes tested anyway?
Levon ate a indigestible chunk of humble pie and unscrambled his lips and tongue to make a sound resembling conversation.
"I am a neuro-surgeon. I'm based here at Addenbrookes. Have you heard of the advances in cerebral gyno-genetics?" Levon made namedropping mistake.
The green eyes did not flicker, acknowledge or show any sign of sincere, or simulated interest.
"Hmm, OK, remain seated and hold still please." She gave a brittle and impatient point of a finger. Levon decided she was more 'off' than a bride's nightie.
She wheeled the intimidating instrument towards him and clamped his face into it. It was a museum piece more fitting in medieval dungeon. Chipped cream enamel and a gammy wheel. A mechanical Medusa that loomed with snakeheads of cables and robotic arms. She rolled it in front of him and then she sat behind it like she was straddling an anti-aircraft turret. He expected her to machine gun fire the rubber plant behind him at any moment. Her knees brushed with his and she deftly cranked this lever and that, to scrunch his face into this barbaric iron montrosity.
His face was directly a nose-length away. She was vaguely pretty. Pale and picking her words indiscriminately. It was a shame she wore ruby lipstick, somehow it made her look as if she had been hit in the face with a meat axe. Her lips a little fleshy and cartoon-like.
She was not as pale as him.
Levon was literally one in a million.
To be precise, one in one hundred and fifty nine thousand. He was Albino.
He had endured problems with his eyes all his life. It was not the usual symptom of needing longer arms to read. 'Playing the trombone' to do the National Lottery. Short or long sightedness was the very least of his worries. His genetic defect had made his pink eyes photo-sensitive. Instead of sun-soaked holidays in Ibiza, it was better for his health, to have long weekend with his caseload, in a caravan at Heacham, on the North, Norfolk coast. He only went on vacation abroad in late winter. His skin like ancient bleached parchment needing sunblock to fetch the milk in. .
Levon was thirty three years of age. The best Neuro surgeon at Addenbrookes hospital, Cambridge, had to offer. He had notched up an impressive work record. He was at the cutting edge of pioneering surgery to save fetal blindness. His work included pilot surgery on unborn children who suffer Viral Hyperopia. A condition that affects one in three hundred western children. Rare in Asiatic countries.
Levon had studied the degenerative associations of similar diseases between the brain and the retina over four years. Myopia and astigmatism were the most common eye disorders he researched as a student Doctor.
He was also working on preventative cure for glaucoma by the revolutionary procedure of operating on a fetus at twenty two weeks. Highly controversial and life threatening for both Mother and child. The operative technicalities involved high doses of anaesthetic and injecting re-structured DNA into the babies front lobe of its brain.
A technique never tried before.
In the worse scenario the Mother will need an abortion, because the culture can only to take effect when the pregnancy is dangerously late in term. The baby is sufficiently developed to have an injection delivered into the centre of the brain along the olfactory tract behind the optic nerve. The baby may suffer a brain damage if the needle ruptures an artery. The mother may need to abort if the fetus goes into distress. On the other side of the knife edge if the operation succeeds, it will be several years before further tests rule out glaucoma.
A procedure that lasts approximately thirty minutes ,yet carries the same risks as rip, shit or bust.
At best, he was spearheading state-of-the-art surgery of a nature that was years ahead of its time. A breakthrough involving genetics and neuro surgery. A 'pre-conceived' cure for glauocoma that will leave a child that is born visually impaired, sighted, into adulthood.
Genetic engineering will rule the day.
The post-surgical complications are high risk. Rejection of the implant by the fetus resulting in miscarriage. Again, sterility is a risk. Brain damage to the fetus even at full term. Possible effects being 'top of the tree' cerebral palsy for the newborn infant, should it live.
Minimal trauma would risk autism or blindness at birth.
Depending on how God feels at the time, a 'possible' of all of these elements in the crucible together.
From Levon's position, such a vital advance in his career would give him the purchase he needed to springboard his research.
He would ride in the same Gondola as all the icons before him. He could bask in the afterglow Sperry and Luria. Pioneers of the Prague school. Others like Martinet and Whitaker who experimented the co-relation of lesions and linguistics. These guys de-coded and re-trained the brain to compensate for minimal trauma
Levon's dream. Not just to stimulate the brain. To re-grow it. To reverse dysfunction. To modify its damaged tissue with genetic engineering by re-programming the D.N.A and putting it right back in there again, where he found it. Identify the faulty gene, remove it and replace it.
Critics called him a latter-day Dr Frankenstein. His practical theoretics made sheep cloning as trendy as blacking stoves.
To Levon the word 'Medical' spelled 'Media' with a couple of letters missing. His profession, his science, was being turned on its head. He was walking a controversial, inethical and amoral tightrope. A veritable can of worms that could force him underground. The national press were pursuing him like a swarm of left winged locusts.
Legal concerns and issues that might kill kids or turn their brains into a box of frogs. He was already accused of wanting to perform experiments so atrocious he had been labeled by the 'The Daily Endorser' as associating his ethics with Nazi death-camp barbarism.
Before his eye appointment, he had picked up some glucose tablets from the concourse and seen the popular 'easy-read' with the headline 'Blinding idea by Dr Kubelik' … "Eye op on the unborn, sure to kill, say experts."
"This damned comic," Levon tore off the top of the page and threw change at the startled vendor. She rummaged among trays of chocolate bars for the remnants of cash, pulling a face at him, to punish further.
Levon breathed his curse as he read the sacrilegious rantings of the 'gutter press' with a circulation that gave it the most 'street cred' and not the average I.Q to its readership..
"Written on arse-paper…… by stump jumpers……Christ, look at this bollocks….." He moaned, head down and kicked the door open of the clinic he was three minutes late arriving to.
Such a meltdown in research of neuro-genetics meant professional suicide for Levon. If his work became discriminated against, it would just stunt further progress in the field. He would be laughed out of his laboratory and they would slap him in a plant breeding institute for the rest of his working life watching his efforts made fun of in the X-files.
Such lousy press could end a lot of eminent careers faster than you can say 'binocular vision anomalies'.
It would turn conventional medicine inside out. Chew it up one side and down the other.
Two weeks ago he was seduced by the media and being interviewed by chat-show hosts that were blowing out celebrities to hire him. Last weekend, Channel Four had left a dozen messages on his ansaphone. How crazy could things really get.
Now the sons of bitches were turning on him like Alsatians.
He was opening the bomb bay doors and blowing away so many stuffed shirts on the factory floor that he was not sure if he was about to be knighted or kidnapped.
He was mad for it. This was no time for a thirteenth juryman.
Levon was brought up in a close and loving family. He was special and he was treated as if he was, by his Mother particularly. His Father made little excuse for self-pity and taught his son the art of 'getting on with it.' Levon was instructed as an infant to wear his physical idiosyncratic appearance like a crown.
He remembered the way the children teased him. How he used to steal used teabags, and try to change his skin colour in front of the mirror each morning. How his Father berated him for stealing his Grecian 2000. He recalled the name calling, 'Casper', 'spook' 'milkbottle', 'keep left sign' and 'Daz'.
His parents turned his emotions around. From feeling like a sideshow freak, to being a worthy addition to the planet. Having 15% less pigment than the average caucasian was the bullies' loss, not his. He worked out five times a week and had a body as hard as a hous-brick. Sure, he wore tinted anti-U.V contacts and shaved his head. But in the buff, he looked like the next great 'whiter than white' hope.
When Levon walked into a bar it was others that bought the drinks. Not just because of his physique. Not because he took a helicopter to work. Not because he wore a brand new pair of Calvin Klein socks each and every day.
A small fixation since childhood. He remembered when his Father died. The boy was thirteen years old.
Jacob Kubelik was killed by a drunk driver when he picked Levon up from school. It was raining. On the way home just yards from his own drive a builders van careered into the family Wartburg. Mother ran outside and screamed for help. A neighbour called the emergency services. The fireman had to cut them both free.
Levon never forgot his Fathers bloodied shoe in the road and his leg snapped back on itself, with a foot hanging outside the drivers side door. There was a hole in his sock where his big toe stuck through. His Mother pulled the sock off in embarrassment before the paramedics arrived. That image remained with Levon.
It was a twofold tragedy. His Mother miscarried the next day. Levon lost his twin sisters because of the rain.
Ever since that day in 1978 he hated the rain. He would never drive in it. If it had not been raining, the man in the van would of been laying bricks and not laying in the bar.
Levon commanded respect. He was head of the most prestigous surgical team in Europe.
Extraordinarily, he was trading places with the patient for once. He found the experience very daunting. He felt humbled by it. A sort of vulnerability, like a very strange frailty or helplessness. That sort of feeling you get when you lean back on your chair and at the moment you think you are going to keel backwards, you catch yourself. Just in time. Levon had felt like that for the last month.
His precarious vision problems had persisted. He had suffered conjunctivitis and 'dry-eye' due to light damaged corneas. The contact lens helped with drops of 'artificial tears'. Now under investigation, a fresh diagnosis was about to explain the foamy patches in the corners of his eyes which looked like another infection. The symptoms were the same as the cause of blindness in children in the third world. Malnourishment, was not his problem.
He had read somewhere that if only those poor kids ate the leaves off the trees it would provide enough Vitamin A to stop blindness.
Levon looked back at Dr Sikotoski with his sore orbs streaming through the Tonemeter. Another instrument of torture that measures eye pressure. An unpleasant exercise. It puffs the eye with a blast of air that for Levon, felt like he had chopped chillis squished into each one.
She wore a slightly puzzled frown and twitched her nose.
"Dactor, I have to sibmit my findinsk to zer consultant invoved mit your case. I hev updated your lenziz becorz of zer marked deterioration in your vision. Zis iz due to zer the degeneration of the cornea. Internal fluids ezcape becorz zer cornea iz melting."
She pitched her half-rims across her desk and looked up awaiting a response by adopting an expression like she was about to don a black cap.
"Melting, what do you mean melting, my eyes may look like raspberry icecream but……Look, can you give me the damn generic for God's sake?"
Levon was grappling to remain professional. A renowned surgeon must stay calm at all times when giving or receiving grave news in the course of his obligations to the patients, families and fellow professionals. The fact he was being told that his eyes were turning to mush and he may never use the tools of his trade again had nothing to do with bad manners. His eyes were now filling with natural tears instead of those from a tube in his top pocket. His head pounded as he twisted his sunglasses into a reef knot between his fingers. They snapped like a carrot. Levon looked down at them and stuffed the disabled remains into his jacket pocket.
The stark woman reached for a reference book above her, the size of the latest Harry Potter and thumbed with one hand as she slipped on her spectacles. Her false nail following the index with he same enthusiasm as looking for a phone number.
"Iz not conclusive, but my opinionz iz zat your eyez problem iz uzzervize known az Gladstones Lupus Blennoroea. It copies zer symptoms of zer late onzet of Zyphilis, yah."
"Syphilis, Christ, you mean Chlamidia Tracomatis?"
Levon was a virgin. Celebate. Not only did he look like the driven snow, he invented it. He had made a pact with his ghost of a body never to indulge in carnal knowledge. What he didn't ever try, he would never miss. His only relationship with another female was the one he enjoyed with his Mother, and they were rarely left alone, or seen in public together.
He had no objection to 'right hand marriage', some junk-food and the odd dubious website. He was not made of alabaster even if he looked like he was.
The lady with the freeze frame frown almost broke her jaw smiling and tilting her head to one side and seemed to make the unnatural effort to speak re-assurringly. An octave lower and in a whisper.
"Dactor Kubelik, vee know zis iz not co-related. Zer zimptoms manifezz a zimilarity only. You are a 'Tyrozine negative albino' with myopia and Nystagmus. You know thiz much, yah? Vot concerns me is the rate of diminished vizzual acuity. Zer tests point to anuzzer probable concern……."
Levon knew about Nystagmus alright.
It was a nerve induced jerky movement of both eyes. It happened when he was upset. The eyes move uncontrollably from side to side, like those of underground tube passengers trying to read advertising slogans on the side of the platform walls. Except, to those who stare at him (especially those hypocrites who pretend not to stare and then take their child to one side, thinking they are out of earshot and say to the gawking brat, "that's what will happen to you if you don't take your Sanatogen..") it looks like he is looking for something that just isn't there. Sometimes. He knew it was happening but could not control it. Only sometimes.
"Go on." Levon uttered those two words wishing dearly he didn't mean them.
The elegant fingers stroked her chin and her eyes fixed on his wobbling ones.
"Zer scan ve took lass week confirm an abnormal growth…a tumour zat zurroundz zer optic nerve to your left eye. Zer mass iz located in in zer frontal lobe also……I am zorry…it iz malignant and inoperable."
The news was like taking a tight shoe off. He had no delusions now. Until fifteen seconds ago he had an eye infection. Now he was going home with a death sentence. Levon was used to seeing a lot of death. He knew he was going to die a little earlier than most. The nature of Albinos. He was glad his 'window of opportunity' albeit brief was a full one. He probably had seen more of the world and its beauty, than a hundred people with pilot vision. He had no doubt saved more souls than Billy Graham on the operating table. Death, was just God's way of telling him to quit while he was ahead. It explained a lot. He could let it all go now.
He did not wait to make another appointment. His head swam and appeared to drown in the process. Then silence and slow motion. No thoughts. A sweet interlude of suspended animation. An out-of-mind experience. Noiseless sleepwalking. His confused cranium swiveled on its axis. His usually pasty face flushed and sweating.
He felt like ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag.
A calm like he was a leaf being carried on a spring breeze swept him up and without any notion of where his numb body was walking, he brushed past bodies in the hospital concourse.
Gowned, corpse like figures with saline cradles shuffling past a tangle of wheelchairs and scurrying trolley beds. Worried relatives dragging bored children to buy cut-flowers and grapes. Giggling, rookie nurses, eating crisps and off to share a Silkcut.
All these people. All dying whether they were sick or not. The carer and the cared for.
A shopping mall fifty yards from a mortuary. Doctors with eyes like pizzas and telltale 'squiffs' of sticky-up hair denoting a lack of sleep. 'Knit one pearl one' across the forehead of one, where probably he woke up 'alseep' on folded arms, between back-to-back shifts. A jumble of open fronted private businesses all making a living out of the dying.
Everything you could possibly want before you come through that door made of rubber, with a ticket on your toe.
Levon was psychologically disintegrating. He had no sense of what was real. The social and physical demands were nothing compared to losing his sight and then his life, but not necessarily in that order.
He had held onto everything. Not just his virginity. Every breath was a personal triumph. Now, he felt like his career was lying in the path of a nuclear explosion. Non-existence and nothingness, the only thing to look forward to.
He was waiting for the giant flash.
The frosted window swing door pushed open in front of him and true to the nightmare his red-rimmed eyes took the full force of the low winter sun. He shielded his crunched up eyes and fumbled for his two halves of sunglasses. Head bowed, he ran weaving through a knotted line of cars. He yanked his tie off and threw it behind him. His jacket soon followed. He didn't cry. If he could, it would be an ocean. Instead he hung onto a streetlight and threw up, outside A&E. A convenient place to be ill. A porter called out.
"Alright,sir?" A pretty stupid question to ask anyone who has just left their entire intestines on a footpath. Levon, was in the middle of a spasm of convulsions in rich technicolour. In between gagging, he motioned a gesture that translated "yes, I do this all the time," because a mime, was all he could manage.
The tattooed smoker assigned to a white uniform and holding up a brick pillar laughed and jeered.
"Did you have good night last night? If only I had a pound for every time I felt like you, chummy."
To the first part of the question, he could not tell the man, who was now smoking his thumbs, that he had spent all night removing a aneurysm from the base of a brain in a six year old girl. A confidentiality issue. Also, the fact that this Philistine would not be able to pronounce the condition anyway. Deep in thought and his own vomit, he wondered, why di the N.H.S employ body-snatchers with all the human compassion of Ghengis Khan.
Removing some 'ectoplasm' from his tie, Levon composed himself and reading the galloping iron railings like braille he followed them, crossing his hands over each other every two or three, for support. He stopped to blow his nose into a monogrammed hankerchief not willing to inspect it afterwards and throwing it into a litterbin. He slid down a trunk of a tree and sat down on the grassy dew. His cold sweat meeting the bark through his shirt. It was only ten above and he was perspiring like a racehorse. His lopsided Raybans defending what was left of his eyesight. A soft padding behind him turned out to be the Goliath that 'took the juice' out of him seconds ago.
"Ere's your jacket mate, its brass monkeys out here, unless you want to catch your chuffin' death too." The thug better employed at Argos threw Levon's Armani beside the panting feverish heap on the floor.
Levon took it all back. He wasn't such a bad moron after all.
His fleeting, precious moments of vision started to pan the hospital grounds. It was a veritable airport from the air. Pay and display carparks in a hotpotch of herringbone. One with indicators flashing and parping incessantly, as if to shout "Where's my Mummy?"
Levon mused to himself.
'Herringbone parking under a mackerel sky, with one space hoping to fillet." What did he have to laugh about? Why is it we all respond inappropriately when we get bad news?
Should he see Reuben his priest? Reuben visited his Mother for a tuna fish sandwich every Monday night. Perhaps it was time to call in the debt.
What good would that do?
Reuben was more sales, than management in the soul saving department.
He looked up, exhausted and squinted through the bare breathless branches of a horse chestnut. With all the bustle of buses and screeching Ambulances returning to the 'Mothership'. The stream of timeless traffic. The unbroken ribbon of patients, cripples and invalids being belched in and out of this hideous, converted multi story car park, with a 200foot chimney that stalked you wherever you happened to be. The roundabout island that flung vehicles around it like a fairground chair-a-plane with a mishmash of traffic beacons that made it light up like a spherical pinball machine.
Levon looked on with deluded interest.
The roundabout held prisoner two elderly gardeners. Marooned, and in need to spend a penny one made a valiant attempt to make the mad dash off the mound of pretty turf, and dodge the traffic to get across the road. He tried once then twice and decided to give up and carry on with his task. How did they make a bid for the public convenience over the road, then? Levon became convinced they probably wore continence pads in case they crapped themselves. With a combined age of three thousand, crossing the road to get to the toilet in the rush hour was a race with the devil. The bib and braced gents tickled the soil with hoes like they might disturb something. Like a second world war mortar bomb, perhaps? Or was any sudden movement a potential explosion of the bladder already the size of a football?
Levon was soaked in atmosphere as well as sweat. He watched the two workmen shuffle around the island pricking the earth and, occasionally stooping for a stray weed. They meandered in a ritual fashion like they were engaged in some bizarre, but very boring barn dance with absolutely the minimum of enthusiasm. Like the moving parts on a rotating board game. The flowers on that roundabout manicured like a well kept grave. How typical, the doctor thought. The only available and well cared for beds on the complex. Beautiful "Bachelors buttons" with blue-grey foliage and shining gold flowers. Red hot pokers and primroses. Lurela of various descriptions.
It was worth having a terminal disease just to see the white catkins.
Levon fell to earth like a meteorite. He decided not to tell his Mother and walk back to his 'chopper' that announced its presence by his bleep signal. It was being cranked up on the heli-pad on the westside of the 'Rosie'.
He jumped up too quickly and got that feeling when you have vertigo. He did not have far to go, just to the westside of the rosie.
His mouth felt like a vultures crutch. His eyes, feeling like he had the sleep removed with wirewool. The sound of rotars neared and Rob the pilot waved. Levon was going to do his homework and make some calls to colleagues in New York. To get a second opinion. First, he would find his fake 'tube of tears' with a hot soak and a Martini. Little things like that will never be taken for granted again. He could retire now. He was wealthy. He owned a holiday home in Puerto Banus. He paid for his Mother to visit Auntie Ruth in Poland three times a year. He spent two months a year in Alghero, Sardinia, writing his book "The Rock of Neuro-science and the Role of Medicine." He had a professorship at Kings college, Cambridge.
He had about six months to live.
As the sand vortexed around him with beat of the copter blades he shielded his embattled eyes again. They had been jabbed, puffed at, poked, injected, swabbed, dazzled so what could a shovel-ful of pea gravel in each sunken cavity do, anyway?
The mounting din almost drown his mobile phone and as he popped the Nokia from its leather holster. He gestured to the pilot with his thumb to his throat to cut the engines. He about turned and walked away from anymore airborne foreign bodies and to hear his message.
^^Lee…….need you at Trauma now, got a woman, late thirties,…pregnant, fetus twenty weeks or so, Mother in R.T.A…suspected clot between the pitituary and stem…need your penknife in theatre, pronto…repeat…asap..do you copy,over?"
Levon choked a response and broke his step into a jog, towards the 'A' block, theatre seven. He bowled past a crash cart into the washroom and into a green mask with long eyelashes. A concerned expression from hazel eyes and plucked eyebrows. It was his assisant, Dr Trudy Spencer. She had covered his tracks on many near-misses and today was no different.
Trudy was a handpicked professional with more distinguished awards and certificates than you could shake a stethescope at. If she was a naval officer she would be wearing a chest-ful of fruit-salad. She was unashamedly modest. This Islington woman had started as a district nurse turned midwife. By the early eighties she trained as a gynaecologist and then obstetrician. White city hospital back in the 'sixties'. A time served neurologist too.
Trudy Spencer was a superhuman married to a British Telecom engineer. Levon's answer to Mother Teresa or 'Sausage Bottom' as he affectionately called her. A description of her posterior when stuffed into leggings. She was as humble as a hired hand. He worked the knife, she worked the monitors and scopes. Trudy made the punters feel like she was their Mother, but she could slice you in two with a look, leaving the scalpel where it was, in the kidney dish. She also had a cockney 'turn of phrase' that would make Iggy Pop blush.
"What happened to you? Your right eye… looks like a strippers clit."
Levon dived into his gown and scrubbed up.
"Spoken like a woman Trood, I expect we can thank Decklan your hubby, for that charming metaphor, can we?"
Levon, humouring his trusty sidekick with a general and sweeping insult.
"Hey, your talking about the man I love, its the cleavage when he's running up those ladders don't you know? He's my big hairy monster, so watch out."
Trudy flicked a latex glove at his backside.
"Yea, thank God for our Deck, Charlie will be so proud to find him after all these years."
Levon baited her.
"Charlie, who?" She looked under her eyelids, dropping the surgical mask and sucking her teeth.
"Charles Darwin, of course." Levon ducked playfully.
"Ok, what we got?" They followed each other through the smoky plastic shredded curtain.
"Female, thirty seven. Twenty two weeks pregnant. Female fetus. Severe concussion, heavy clot to the upper brain stem. Babie's not a happy bunny either. Eighty 'mill' of Thiopentone. Morphine on the bus. Slipping in out, on arrival, some paralysis. Non-vegetative. Can communicate verbally." Trudy did some crochet with some spaghetti hanging from a monitor as she briefed him.
The woman was hooked up to some Factor 8 (plasma,not suncream) and using a 'respiratory'. The team lashed her with a cardiograph and the radiologist cranked up the ultrasound monitor as it waltzed towards her castors. Unlike the victim, buzzing and clicking into life.
"Locked-in syndrome?" Levon quizzing his assisant as he adjusted the overhead lights to the right angle. He was asking Trudy for an 'off the cuff' diagnosis. She recognised the symptoms, a flood of thrombosis to the brain, caused by an impact severe enough to stop motor functions but leaving the mental state intact. Few recover. The cards heaped against a pregnant victim.
Trudy nodded in agreement as she slid the cystoscope into the woman's stirrupped inner thighs. Levon arrayed his instruments, asking for the last of his artificial tears to be squirted into the corner of each eye as he stared upwards at the tiled ceiling. It was a straight forward operation for the surgeon. Less simple for the patient with child. One, or the other may have to wave goodbye. If the Mother survived she would most likely, in any book of statistics, end up with a wheelchair for company.
Levon made the first porthole incision and switched the drill on.
"Ok, ladies and gentlemen, lets help God get some more brownie points….give me some suction and Classical FM…….. thank you……Trudy… in your own time talk turkey to me, on this one. I did this seven summers ago and it was a 'feet-first' job, so lets surprise the tabloids this time shall we?"
Levon worked on the head. It was bolted in a frame, in traction. An Asian woman, whose orange religious mark on her forehead was now being spattered with vascular fluid. His mind wandered in a non-life threatening way and pondered over the course of the days events, as powdered bone spewed into the mix.
Like the lorry that hit this woman, his dreams had been smashed also. He looked hard at the woman. She was so beautiful. Unblemished, before he pierced the front of her skull. Breathtaking. Softly chiselled cheekbones with a little dark peach-fuzz down her temples and along the nape of her neck. She had a small scar under her chin. Not an imperfection. A mark to her advantage and worn as a trophy to her in her repose. A generous, gentle mouth. She reminded him of the profile of some ancient princess on an Egyptian tomb. Her classical sweep of the forehead. A long bridge to her nose of a divine form. Such grace and dignity even in her coma. A far-reaching attraction with no limits. A personal radiance that left him in awe. She was a perfect vine of human form. A rosetree beauty in his wilderness. A bloom and freshness that was as natural as it probably was twenty years before. Up until she had been struck down on a Zebra crossing, 'gravity' had been very kind to her. Even close to death, she had the kind of captivation that poets through the centuries and today rave about, in its highest form. A gift that nature takes care not to make too common.
He stopped drilling and touched her glowing olive skin. God had given everything to her, except the right to breath of her own accord. If this was the last face he saw and he could see her eyes looking up and smiling at him, he would buy her the best chicken madras money could buy. The swirl of K-Y jelly, found a second heartbeat.
"The 'jam-eater' is going to make it." The anaesthetist cheered.
Levon brushed away an unprofessional tear. He didn't do tears. Only ones from a tube and over-the-counter.
The woman had a lot more to lose than him. His self-pity turned to deep guilt and shame. At least he knew success and world acclaim.
How many times had this woman met Tony Blair or world leaders in life-saving medicine? Did she have scores of fawning junior Doctors treating her like J.C? Did she get paid obscene amounts of money to write for the Observer once a month?
The poor creature laying in front of him, made him realise that life is more important than dinner-parties and good champagne. Radio interviews and getting a mention in the 'Lancet'. She did not care about handmade shoes and shooting clays every Sunday.
Levon had tunnel vision. It had nothing to do with melting corneas.
He had tasted life to the full. All, this helpless individual wanted to do was to taste it once. For herself and her baby.
Dr Kubelik did not renew his contract and retired from his profession to spend Christmas with Kuprinda and Levon her baby son. He helps run the restaurant until she is able to walk unaided. He decided to take all three generations of the Patel family to his Sardinian retreat in the spring. His shaded terrace is 'quite skin friendly', he tells them. 'Asian people,' he tells them, "are not like us 'Mad dogs' on holiday."
His apartment in Alghero faced the westside of the fortress-like prison. A large formidable stone penitentiary with inwardly sloping walls and watchtowers at each point of the compass. Constructed in the 15 century it looked like a giant sandcastle made from a awesome plastic moulded beachbucket. Patrolled by guards cradling machine guns it was a silent reminder of zero-tolerance. For a country that was besieged throughout history by foes and scarcely won a battle, still, all Sardinian men were required to join the militia for a year as part of their National duty. An island of serenity and a deep respect for law and order.
His roof terrace looked out onto the top of the open market that crackled with life and chants from sellers of olive oil, fresh fish caught that morning and spices and vegetables. A few goats and chickens scavenged. A speck of an old woman with a single tooth and skin of leather, dressed in black as custom for widows yelled her negotiations to a potential buyer of her giant peppers. Sitting under the cloth gazebo his eyes followed the street palms that meandered from his sanctuary to the clear shallow calm of the mediterranean. As the sun set on the gently still surface, its shimmer captured a flock of starlings, that left a birch tree when a car door slammed and soared in unison with a screech of chatter. The army of songsters as if knitted like a black shawl, twisted and changed shape in a cyclone of uniform energy and soon swept away into the shadows. The tobacco plants and jasmine spread their sweet aroma with the gentle heat of the evening. Clay pots allowed themselves to be dotted around the terracotta, home to cyclamens and lilies. All with their charming hues. Levon placed his beef tea on the marble and rock ledge of his veranda step.
Little Esther appeared from behind him and jumped into the good Doctor's arms. A seven year old that had been recently shown what a 'chinese burn' can do to grown-ups. After, wriggling into his chest, they sat for a full five minutes on the swing chair hugging while he serenaded the fingersucking youngster with the elderly but all too lovely 'Lavender Blue'.
A soft silence left them listening to a few jangling cell doors being scraped shut in the prison. A distance noise of dangerous men being locked up, that left you feeling warm on the outside, but probably left others cold on the 'inside'. A straggle of children played football below in the square, at a time when all good kids should be thinking about going to bed.
"Thank you Uncle Levon for saving Mummy and my little sister. You know, my Daddy is in heaven and he spoke to me last night and said, he wants you to look after Mummy." The girl whispered in Levon's ear and then rubbed her nose with his. Waiting for a response, she sat up and twisted to face him, holding either of his cheeks with the flat of her hands.
"Well, your Mum's going to be fine, trust me, I'm a Doctor." He chuckled, forced to gaze into a the child's nuggets of black gold for eyes. With her toothless lisp requiring him to squeeze her even tighter and inviting an attack of vicious tickling, off his knee, and onto the floor.
The child conceded defeat and through a series of awkward, giggling moves climbed back on his lap. She looked again hard into his eyes. He could make out her tiny features with the same clarity as looking through a glass window smeared with petroleum jelly. She looked like a very misty Mowgli, her thick, black shining hair cut to the bottom of the ear. With red ladybirds clipping her chopped fringe.
She then said something that would change his life, forever.
"Mummy said, she felt your hands on her face and knew she was going to be alright……you know….. When you made a hole in her head…….. She said she felt your love and kindness……… She told me not to tell you…..that … that she watched you from the ceiling and….and saw you crying……. Mum, said she saw you stroke her forehead and that she would always love you. Its a secret…… I promised not to tell, you promise not tell, will you, will you?"
Levon stared and paused and then whispered "I will". Esther dashed off out of vision at three metres. Singing 'Lavender Blue' and skipping off to her bed.
He said the same two words again, three weeks later, this time to the little girl's mother in front of a priest.
Confidential
Medical Status report 30-01-01 Clinic 12b Addebrookes Hospital, Cambridge.
I examined this man today and his condition is now in remission and has not produced any further significant symptoms since his first course of chemotherapy. His radiology treatment has shrunk the tumour substantially and he is only to continue with a second course in the event of a relapse. He has lost forty percent of his vision as a result of a de-generative illness affecting both corneas with some minor cerebral disturbance, associated with the aggressive nature of the therapy. All prescribed drugs have ceased presently. Catscan at six month intervals advised. Please tell the clerk to brief his G.P.
Dr Sebastian Dossitor (consultant radiologist)
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