Bunker

Alzheimer: Do Ghosts Cry? | home

Bunker

nine o'clock, the first rush of the morning, it would go on until eleven when he could devote a bit of time to humans, leave all these debris floating on the stagnant stream of the sewer of age.

Bunker, what a silly name, he often asked his parents how they had come to pick up such a name, so easy to make jokes. Well, anyway, if they wanted to make jokes about someone, there is never a lack of targets.

Really he was not Bunker, he was Doctor Bunker. Nobody called him Doctor Bunker. The staff, his so called colleagues called him Bunker, the visitors called him Doctor and the patients did not call him anything, they would look at him and say "is that you JIm?" of " I don't want you to come and rob me again, Uncle Joe" or they would look at him with these transparent eyes, eyes remembering but that could not remember what they were remembering.

Bunker, yes, Doctor Bunker; he rather thought of himself, wishfully as Sewage Cleaner Bunker. A sewage Cleaner was leaving after his visit a proper, well flowing system, whereas he, Dr Bunker, wherever he intervened, he would leave behind him an even greater mess, a even more stagnant flow of putrition.

They called that branch of medicine << geriatrics>>. To be a day to day Doctor was not much fun, the patients coming to you and expecting you to hand over one bottle of these little red and green pills and life would become as it was before. But to be a specialist of geriatrics was even more of a joke than being a Doctor.

He wondered if his grand father really know what curse he had put on him, on his Grand-son Bunker, by deciding that he would spend the last twenty years of his life as an Alzheimer patient. Bunker loved very much his Grand Father. It was his grand father that had taught him baseball, not his father. It was his grand father that had explained about girls, his Grand Father who had shown him that while girls looked so superior and disdainful, they could be a lot of fun once they were no longer afraid of him, and yes, they had been a lot of fun.

So why had his grand father left him, why had his grand father left the image of himself, why had he become that forgetful, smelly, drooling, ridiculous object they were making fun of because he would do anything to get a cigarette and they made him do anything.

He had wanted to save all that happiness of his childhood, he had wanted so much to save his Grand Father, he had had so much for the Image of his Grand Father, so he made the dumb decision to become a geriatrist. Somebody should hold back fools that wanted to jump into the Pacific from the Golden Bridge, apparently nobody found it worth to hold him back.

He called himself Terminator, Terminator Bunk, what else could he call himself?

Nobody had found a pill that would make aging less of a hell than if was. Nobody was working on a pill that would make the aging of those you loved more supportable, unless you considered that whiskey was such a pill.

He is Doctor Bunk, he goes the Wards, he issues instructions, he writes reports, he writes recommendations, his instructions are forgotten in the stress of the impossible moment to moment management of the still standing hurricane of life without life, his orders where filed for later consideration, his recommendations were a joke, where would one find the money.

The families would come to him with that awkward gate, that shifty look in their eyes, he knew, Doctor Bunk knew they wanted to discuss with him "end of life" actions, afraid to say the words, afraid to be understood, looking at him, waiting for him to ensure them that they would not suffer, that yes they would be given morphine, that yes, there was no limit to the amount of morphine that could be ordered, that the control of pain and anxiety was primordial to life sustaining.

Ten years ago, when they entrusted their elders to him, he would give them the speech about being patient and hopeful, that they must remember that the labs were working on an age wreckage control molecule, that this was one of the worlds first priority, that was ten years ago, now he had even stopped giving that pep you up speech, apparently, the more the looked for the anti age wreckage pill, the less they understood why the mind could endure just a normal day.

Geriatrics, they were barely doing much better than at the time of this Grand Father, a hand on a confused forehead was the miracle to suffering even if the voice would say "you are such a good boy my Billy".

One day Doctor Bunk could possibly be in that chair, there, near the television set, the place nobody wanted, the place given to the deaf patients, and the nurses would whisper to newly arriving still well starched beginners "do you know that he used to be a doctor in this Unit?".