Connect
MJA
MJA

Salt peanuts

Sarah Green
Med J Aust 2015; 202 (4): 216. || doi: 10.5694/mja14.01331
Published online: 2 March 2015

My dad in the neonatal ICU as a med student
was kind of responsible, at least for five minutes
for keeping all of those babies alive,
but he tried not to think about it.
He adjusted miniature IVs.
He recorded vital signs on charts and signed as
illegibly as possible, to seem official.
The babies didn't know how frail they were.
They thought they were normal puppies.
They thought he was their dog mother.
But the machines were how they ate and breathed.
The machines in charge of keeping track
of heart function sounded like dripping tap water
or, at times, the silver resonance of a tuning fork.
The sounds crossed.
There was almost a steady rhythm.
There was almost a tune —
“Salt Peanuts” by Dizzy Gillespie, my dad thought
but none of the nurses had heard of it.
They heard heart monitors. They had clean sheets to fold.
So he had to wait thirty years to tell me and my brother
in the car on the way to dinner, as if he heard
our healthy hearts and lungs pumping, and thought of it
as if we were old enough now.

  • Sarah Green1

  • Athens, Ohio, USA.


Correspondence: sarahegreen@gmail.com

Author

remove_circle_outline Delete Author
add_circle_outline Add Author

Comment
Do you have any competing interests to declare? *

I/we agree to assign copyright to the Medical Journal of Australia and agree to the Conditions of publication *
I/we agree to the Terms of use of the Medical Journal of Australia *
Email me when people comment on this article

Online responses are no longer available. Please refer to our instructions for authors page for more information.