Prompt: 21. Syllabic
Character(s): Nurse at LTCF
Word Count: 566
Rating: PG
Warning(s): None
After awhile everyone is categorized by convenience and necessity, she had thought during school and lecture and clinical rotations that she would never be so crass as to identify people by their disease alone, but the truth is that it is as simple as it is mind numbing and in this job everyday becomes less meaningful than the one before it unless a disaster occurs.
She wonders if this is what other people of a trade feel as their lives slowly start to isolate into parts, categories, and tiny boxes of classification.
She wonders if this is what it is like for her patients, she knows it isn't but she understands that theirs is a different sort of classification process to their lives, their activities, their thoughts.
A disease affects everything, coats all things in life in a tarnish of routine and symptoms.
The lucky patients are the ones who are unaware of it.
The lucky patients are the ones the rest of the world views as the worst off but she knows that blissful unawareness of what is happening is as good as it gets.
The lucky patients of the world are the Mr. Hales, the TBIs, the CVAs, the unresponsive, the comatose, the ones who don't know that they are defined by the shortened acronyms of their diagnosed disease.
There is no complacency for them, only mute time, habits don't form because nothing comes of their temporary consciousness, and there are no differences between the days or minutes or seconds.
Awareness brings no such ease of existence.
She wonders if for patients like him that life confined to a chair or a bed with no ability to communicate or correlate experiences is like a dream, like a goldfish with a three-second memory, or if it's a hell built up of confinement and isolation.
But the mind adapts, the brain moves connections and neurons and tries even though evolution hasn't gone as far as self-healing of the nervous system yet to fix what is wrong.
Mind over matter, mutation and stabilization, the ideas leave her with the perverse desire to dissect someone's brain, go back to school and learn how to splice genes, rebuild and retune the chemical properties that leave such sad cases stagnating in a suspended temporary temporal state.
She thinks that if she could do such things, to crack the code, so to speak, would mean that there would no longer be a need to classify people by letters put together in simple unpronounceable words like TBI, that it would make every day less formative to a habit of complacency.
Her break is over and she goes back to the unit to administer the afternoon medications, crushing up the pills she is to put into Mr. Hale's g-tube she comes to the understanding that there really is no difference between him and her in the long run, the unconscious form the same unity of mind as the conscious do, it's just a different type, the unconscious devolve into a state of constant unawareness and the conscious form habitual motions to collate the mass of stimulus information so they don't overload their brains.
It a metaphysical, philosophical deduction that has her thinking about it for too long to be fun anymore.
She waves it off and goes back to work.
Her patient stares at the ceiling when she tells him that she thinks too much.