Toe in the Water

The Land of Echocardiograms

The Land of Echocardiograms

Lying at the end of an apparently interminable number of empty and featureless corridors, the Land of Echocardiograms is indeed like another country. Here the bustling traffic of the rest of the hospital has died away and a different, more sombre mood inhabits the air.

The light is low in these more hallowed halls, deliberately kept in twilight as they are. Only the lush, liquid sounds of beating hearts interrupts the great silence of these darkened rooms, and then only briefly, as though an accidental exclamation of awe at the weight of the inhabitants’ task.

Here the only ceremony is that of the jellied and slippery implement pressed ever harder into flesh, searching always the murmurs of the deepest organs, the quiet ponderings of hidden artefacts.

For an hour I kept quiet in recognition of the need for this silence in the face of such mysterious processes but at last, when the deed was done and all data unloaded to the computer to be displayed in dim shadows against darker shapes, I ventured a question for the custodian of such secrets.

“How many pictures did you take?” The inadequate banality of the word “pictures” sounded like an insult in that serious place, and there was a pause before she answered, without a glance from her continuing work of selection and presentation.

“About seventy.”

Abashed by the immensity of the task, quite clearly beyond my understanding of what was required for success, I lapsed into silence again, duly humbled by my crass ignorance.

Word count: 252