Beep. Beep. Beep….
I stood in the operating room during Cory’s organ-donation surgery, watching the monitor as his blood pressure dropped and his pulse faded. I was a second-year medical student, just beginning my trauma-surgery rotation in an urban hospital. I remember that day as a series of blinks, each one a snapshot of moments that still linger.
Here’s how it began:
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
It’s 8:00 pm.
I’m staring at the IV tubing. We forgot to stop the fluids.
I’m standing in the resuscitation room alongside the naked, broken body of a teenage male. Unable to break my gaze on that dripping IV line, thinking, We’re going to flood him.
Kenneth P. Gurney
The helmet-less skateboarder
with his head split open
never checked his rearview
for the one-in-a-million chance
gaining on him and all of his
experience through
six-hundred-thousand plus
ollies, railslides, and mctwists
makes no real difference
as the EMT scribbles the words
organ donor
on some official looking form
before the ambulance zooms off
toward the hospital.
About the poet:
Kenneth P. Gurney lives in Albuquerque, NM. His poetry appears mostly on the web, as he prefers to spend SASE and reading-fee monies on pumpkin spice cookies for his Dianne. His latest book is An Accident Practiced: Poems by Kenneth P. Gurney. To learn more about Kenneth, visit www.kpgurney.me/Poet/Welcome.html
About the poem:
“I witnessed the ambulance arrive and went over
