5. The Stroke Team

This is probably going to sound horrible and insensitive, but unfortunately, it's true - not because I have made it that way, but because it *is* that way: Taking care of a stroke patient is a little like taking care of an incubated alien egg. They are complete extra-terrestrials. They just lie there in their own little sphere of existence, imperviously. Even though you can touch (usually to inflict pain in an attempt to extract any sense of life from them - "I feel pain therefore I am") There is some imaginary bubble encasing them. Disconnection. Stale. Plastic. Artificial. Living death. Yuck.

Of course, some do go on to improve, to slowly crack the invisible shell encasing them and finally break out, back into the land of the living. But a fare share also - "expire." What a horrible term: expire. Who started using that?!? It's not a carton of milk - it's a HUMAN BEING!!! someone who used to be a kid, someone who once needed mom to help them stir the cookie dough when it got too thick, someone whose feelings were hurt when not enough people showed up at their birthday party when they turned 9, someone who remembers when they got the keys to their first car, someone who remembered the sound of their first born crying their first cry, someome who will remember what it felt like to have a tube shoved down their throat, needles stuck in their arms, people nagging them every 5 minutes "can you show me two fingers, Mr. Stewart, can you wiggle your toes?" The people who then proceeded to talk about them like they weren't even there, and ignored them when they started to choke on their own spit - when they wanted so hard to swallow, but couldn't because something in their brain had gone horribly wrong. They want so much for someone to remember what they once were, and what they know they still are somewhere deep inside, preferably someone with a white coat, or at least one of those ugly brightly colored scrubs with the rubber ducks. Heck even the dude shoving that thing beneath their back as they get ready to take the 124th x-ray they've had since they got to the hospital would be nice...