V-Fib

"That's real," Heather says suddenly,
as the central monitor alarms start clanging.
Her hands catch the warm telemetry strip as it peels off the monitor printer,
a scroll,
an electrical translation,
a metered graph filling with jagged zigzag edges.

"That's real," she repeats,
in her captain voice,
and we know what she's saying.
All hands on deck, this is the Real
that we've drilled for,
that we're intimate with.
The Velveteen Rabbit is meeting the Fairy.
Felt fur is shifting, this is the Real
that expands the single patient view
across half the central monitor screen,
that summons nurses from corners and desks and kitchenette and Pyxis room,
that runs into the room and yells at the patient, feels for pulses, presses the BP button,
that runs to unplug the code cart,
that grabs the paper chart and flips rapidly through the Advance Directive tab,
that calls the operator and attending and charge nurse and chaplain,
that pulls wide open the sliding glass doors to the room,
clicks into Results and checks electrolytes -
time drawn? do we need more?

That's real,
the kind of real that comes just after
the ghosts of friends and family long gone
beckon through the window for their loved one to join them,
just as Willie and that little girl who never left slide their invisible hands into the patient's,
just as the ventricles divorce blood-propulsion,
just before the Velveteen Rabbit becomes a rumored kind of alive.
This is harbinger real -
we run with the code cart down the hall -
real red clouds at morning,
sailors take warning,
clouds with jagged zigzag edges.