Death or something like it

The idea is to die after having lived. After graduating from high school. After finding a job. After meeting the grandkids. After completing a bucket list. And not a moment before.

Of course, that’s just the ideal — real life doesn’t run quite as well. Thousands of children die every day due to any number of reasons ranging from hunger to freak accidents. Most of the time, these deaths are a matter of poverty and circumstance; the rest of the time, they’re the backlash of carelessness and neglect.

Take medical operations, for instance. It’s no secret that going under the knife could mean pushing up daisies before the procedure is even over, yet it’s a risk the patient and his/her family willingly take. The idea is to accept unfortunate results like the mature, sensible beings we are; allowing doctors and staff to wash their hands of the outcome, and desisting from blaming anything but the hand of fate.

Again, that’s just the ideal — people are rarely inclined to exude magnanimity when faced with the loss of a loved one. That kind of bearing can only be assumed by the extremely holy… or the superbly defective. So when someone you love dies on the operating table, you rage and you shout and you weep and you mourn; but most of all, you think and you ask: Why?

Sometimes, the answer isn’t as metaphysical as you think.

It began with the uncontrollable bladder — leaking urine in sporadic bursts throughout the day — a common, yet hardly normal problem. Though capable of being wrought by any number of culprits, in this case, the perpetrator was a fat, little blob known as lipoma. According to Wikipedia (and more credible sources such as WebMD), a lipoma is basically a soft-tissue tumor. It’s slow-growing, composed of fatty tissue, and — insert applause here — is benign. Big surprise that treatment is usually unnecessary, unless the tumor becomes painful enough to restrict movement — or you’re flaky enough to want it removed for aesthetic purposes. At any rate, the problem adhered to the former, and so treatment it was.

The risk, they said, would only be five percent. Not bad, considering there’s the 95 percent as an alternative. And thus, with meddlesome, urine-stimulating tumor removed, life went back to the way it was, and trips to the bathroom were made enjoyable again.

Well, at least for about two weeks.

Then the headaches kicked in.

 Severe, painful, and unrelenting; like someone trying to drill a hole in your skull with a slew of demented woodpeckers — only worse, much worse. When the dizziness wasn’t inducing confusion, it was triggering vomit; when it wasn’t straining the eyes, it was clenching the muscles. And when it took a break from tormenting the mind… it would weigh down on the heart.

The issue, this time, was meningitis, an infection of the fluid of a person’s spinal cord and the fluid surrounding the brain. The Meningitis Research Foundation distinguishes between two of the more common types, namely; viral meningitis, which tends to run a relatively benign course, and bacterial meningitis, which is a serious, life-threatening illness. Although people do recover, treatment must be given A.S.A.P.

Operation time: several hours came and went; a transfer to the recovery room was expected. Instead, the scene was a flurry of white-coats and frenzied moving — straight towards the intensive care unit.

Cardiac arrest, they said. Sudden stopping of the heart, blood not reaching the brain, brain tissue dying because of oxygen-deprivation, and then… the coma.

Sepsis, they said. It lasted four days, but then, who was counting? Time had stopped the moment his heart had.

I’m no med student, and I’m certainly no doctor, but I think it goes without saying that medical operations, or the cutting open of people to poke around their innards, should be withheld as the very last option. Because, more often than not, you can’t undo what’s been done, and anything — anything — can happen. At the very least, get a second, third and fourth opinion before pushing through.

The lipoma wasn’t supposed to be fatal, the risk was only supposed to be five percent. So what went wrong? Human (in this case, doctor’s) error? A lapse in judgment? Carelessness and neglect? No one can say for sure. 

He was only 17, and he had the world just beyond his fingertips.