IN THE SURGICAL WARD.

Mataura Ensign, Volume 11, Issue 821, 2 November 1888, Page 2

IN THE SURGICAL WARD.

" Chlcroforin.or ether, doctor?" "Start Mm with chloroform," is the response. A, handkerchief moistened with the sickening sweet fluid is placed to the patient's nostrils. " Long breatns ! " calls the surgeon, and the 'patient tries to answer "All right ! " but his voice seems to him to step high like the : legs of a drunken man. Now he hears an elevated train coming. It's roads are. of white, light. Every now and then it dujshes past a station, when a' bell rings. Hp is , rushed aboard and on they go, faster and faster. Tbe -bells ring closer . together. " Happy ? " inquires the surgeon- . " Ye-es," answers the patient, with an effort. " Happy ?." the surgeon asks again and there is no answer. .■ . A blank, it may be of minutes, it may be of hours, then softness,, warmth, i comfort. He is in the little country graveyard which he knew when a boy. He is sitting by his own body there. It j lis a sunny summer afternoon. The birds are singing. And he can smell the '.odour 'of 'the pines as they stir in the breeze. Is this death ? Then death is a pleasant experience after all. But wbat is the nausea, the excruciating pain? "Spit it Out" urges someone in a friendly tone. Spit out what, death ? Ah, the pain ! and he is off into blankness once more. A moment of quivering and again the balance strikes. This , time . he half opens his eyes. " He's 'playing possum,'" wbispers a doctor, and the patient resents the irreverence of ihe remark. He is; too fresh from the graveyi rd vision to tolerate joking familiarity^ and there 1 hemay be dead after all 1 The pain again, and the blank not so blank as. before ! There are . scattering thoughts striving to assert themselves. He recognises them slowly, as a child stammers when it reads. " YeB — it is all right — it is all right I ' he says to himself ; and then as if he saw it written m great Capital letters, the thought confronts him, ♦' This must becoming to 1 "-^-From Hospital Life, by A. B. Ward in Scribner's Magazine.