Beep…beep…beep.
What a commonplace sound. A single beep: to alert us, to stop, to go, or to remind us. But if it's repeated, then our sensitivity to the stimulus gradually weakens. Our receptor cells become fatigued so it becomes background noise, however annoying or shrill the beep. Sensory adaption the process is called. We merely become accustomed to the sound and no longer hear it.
I cannot become accustomed to the sound.
Jagged green line moving on black screen.
Dull, really. Light from the screen passes through the cornea into the first chamber, the iris opens, and the ciliary muscle focuses the image which falls onto the retina. The cones transduce the light waves into neural impulses and we perceive the color green; black, the absence of color. The phi phenomenon fills in a moving line when in reality, it is stationary. The jagged green line blinks once; twice, and our eye deduces that it moves. But the line is still; it is our brain that tricks us into thinking it moves.
I know the line is still.
White-knuckled grip.
Such an overused cliché. When we hold onto something so tightly, the skin and muscles stretch taut over the joints of the knuckle. Few capillaries are found there, so the circulation is easily cut off, producing the white-knuckled effect. My skin is pale to begin with and I have large joints, so my grip need not be tight for my knuckles to appear white.
I grip the bed railing, the blanket, the sheet tightly.
Whoosh of air released through valves.
A mildly interesting concept, that of the Controlled Mechanical Ventilator. Positive-pressure ventilators work by increasing the airway pressure through an endotracheal or tracheotomy tube (in this case, a tracheotomy tube). The positive pressure allows air to flow into the airway until the ventilator breath is terminated. The airway pressure drops to zero, and the elastic recoil of the chest wall and lungs push the breath out through passive exhalation. The process repeats, and oxygen is introduced into the bloodstream, sending it to parts of the body, sustaining life.
Sustaining. Surviving. Not living. His heart doesn't know how to beat.
I always dismissed the medulla as incredibly tedious. Why waste my time learning about a part of the brain whose only function is to maintain our heartbeat and our breathing? Any time I had to dissect an animal or a human, I would always cut it away unnecessarily, just because I couldn't be bothered with it.
And yet…
If I could, I would open up his brain. I would probe his medulla and massage it gently with my fingers. I would spend the next year conducting experiments on mice and dissect a thousand just-cold bodies and find the answer to restoring the medulla.
Then my brain would no longer have to adapt to the beeping sound. I would not have to subject it to the phi phenomenon of the moving jagged green lines on black. I could restore blood flow to my hands. I would not have to hear the mildly interesting positive-pressure ventilator.
John's heart would beat. John would breathe. John would open his eyes.
And my heart would know how to beat again.