It’s the start of her shift and she hands me a tea,
With half a sugar. In the day room, like a regular.
A too-familiar welcome for a place we want to leave.
While somewhere three floors below
A registrar, half my age, is cutting up my perfectly-shaped boy.

As the theatre curtain falls
Electric-yellow Nora Virus signs blare at me:
hands off. Place of life and death.
Earlier, he, stockinged feet dangling,
Was held down with guy ropes;
Intravenous drips, translucent tubes,
The perfect paraphernalia of pain relief.
Inert and pinned, like Gulliver on the rocks.

There’s few scheduled ops on Christmas Eve. Time yawns
In the stifled room, reaching across empty steel-white beds.
The sound of shuffling frames and sandled feet,
Porters chat and cackle,
Christmas radio wafts half-hearted jollity.
Unreal. In this real world of pain. Where,

Two nurses sit with a grizzled, pyjama-ed, vacant soul
Unstitch his attachments and hold his hand.
Look into his eyes, draw him from bed to chair
The first step of a long chain home
Into sheltered housing. He refuses.
Two green uniforms stand tall, oversee, frown,
He opens his eyes, moans, then roars,
Finally subdues into sobs. They stretcher him
Away as he flays, as his bagged ID and papers
Slip to the floor.

And all the while the nurses’ touch,
Graceful, instinctive; with eyes, hands, names.
This. Will. Happen. But we will match it with love.
I look away, squirming in the green visitors’ chair.

Last night, the Registrar sat on my boy’s bed.
First names. Like family. She summoned an air
Of precision we’d needed for hours. Within minutes
She is the one I want to open him up.
But it’s a tricky diagnosis and even she
Can’t be certain. She retreated
To her flickering screen; ever the scientist,
Sifting and scanning the data, assessing the damage:
Pulse rate, Diastolic pressure, temperature,
Bloods, cannula, abdominal pain.
Weighing them all
In her small and pinkly-washed hands.

Despite my rocky steady confidence in her
It is the post-op sight of my little boy
In an oxygen mask at midnight
Which unmasks me. The anaesthetist
Touches my arm and the spaceship bleep and hum
Is the only sound in the cavernous, cathedral-dark.
His tiny damp puffs of breath
Like a consecrated mist, blessed incense.

Christmas Day clicks round. I stay for just a little longer
Because I need to rest my eyes on his face.
Marvel at this Christmas miracle.
I want to throw the window up
And lean bodily forward screaming to the world.
Call for a Christmas goose,
He is alive! It’s Christmas Day!
But I’m English.
And instead I drive home steadily.
Eyeing the dark road for surprised deer and sudden fox.