Intubation: A tube is forced down the patient’s throat, which allows them to breathe but costs them their voice. Another tube is routed to the stomach, providing calories without satiation. And through the jugular: sedation without rest.
No one mentions the isolation, the frustration of trying to communicate with hand gestures and pictograms, the cloth restraints we use to tie the patient's hands down if they reach too often for the tube, stripping them even of gestures.
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Ernesto Barbieri is a registered nurse in the Boston area whose writing has appeared in The Believer, Iowa Review, Midway Journal, Fourteen Hills, Berkeley Fiction Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of Hunter College’s MFA fiction program, he is at work on a novel and a graphic memoir.
Jess Ruliffson is a graphic journalist based in Boston. She teaches at Boston University and The Sequential Artists Workshop. See her work and connect at https://www.patreon.com/jessruliffson and www.jessruliffson.com.
Editors: Jim Dao, Marjorie Pritchard,
Heather Hopp-Bruce, and Abbi Matheson
Animation: Heather Hopp-Bruce
Project manager: Abbi Matheson
Audience engagement: Deanna Schwartz
Developer: Andrew Nguyen
Copy editor: Jessie Tremmel
When accidents happen
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Series
When accidents happen
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Recovery and decline
ICU stories 3:
The sisters
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The sisters
ICU stories 4:
Recovery and decline
ICU stories 3:
When accidents happen
ICU stories 2:
When accidents happen
ICU stories 2:
Recovery
and decline
ICU stories 3:
Although the events in this story are real, names have been changed to protect identities.
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