Wednesday 20 February 2013

Dream: I lose my left cornea

In this dream I'm taking handover from someone and suddenly I get a phone call from one of the bosses. He asks me to go and intubate the patient in the corner room because she has been increasingly drowsy all day and he's worried she'll get too drowsy during the night.

I go into the room and the lady appears to be deeply unconscious. So unconscious, in fact, that I estimate I won't need any drugs to intubate her.

There's a laryngoscope and a size 7 tube on the bench just next to her, so I just grab it and put the tube in. Once it's in I realise that the bag is not attached to the wall, and that there appears to be a huge side hole near the connection with the tube (which doesn't exist in real life). When I try to squeeze the bag even with room air, it just all escapes out the side hole and nothing goes into the patient. The patient is still breathing though and her colour is ok, so I decide that there's no imminent reason to panic. In fact I feel remarkably calm given how wrong the situation is.

Soon I realise I'm stranded in the side room and no-one appears to be walking past. I give up and press the nurse call button, and I can hear a distant "ding-dong!" at the nurses station. A nurse whose name I cannot remember comes in and says, "hi I'm Camilla, what can I do for you?" (but her name is not really Camilla)

Just then the patient starts to choke and sputter. She's coughing quite hard and her face turns all red. I ask the nurse if she has any sedation ready at hand, and she says "all I have is these 2mL left of morphine".

I take the syringe from her and start injecting it, but the connection isn't quite right between the syringe and the bung, and it squirts out and hits my left eye.

It stings so sharply in my dream that I momentarily feel as if I'm blinded.

"Let me help you with that, you'd better go look at your eye." Camilla says, taking the syringe from my hand.

I go to the nearest mirror with tears streaming down my face. When I look into the mirror, there are fragments of yellowish stuff floating in my eye, as well as my contact lens which has been shattered into several pieces. I grab some saline and rinse out my eye.

Little bits and pieces wash away easily, but the last part to wash free is a small intact disc of yellow. I intuitively know it's my cornea, and inspect it carefully in my palm. I'd better hold onto this, it'll be pretty hard to get another one. I think to myself.

I look up and a sizeable segment of my eye is missing. The clear fluid from within my eye appears to be seeping out freely and I can see blood vessels at the back of the eye reflected in the glass.

Then I wake up.

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