Merely the Patient by Henry Howard Harper

Reluctant as I am to dwell upon the sad farewells incidental to the departure of souls from this sphere, I feel that the history of this episode would be incomplete without some account of the circumstances and personal sensations attending the crisis. My strength having been seriously impaired by the first operation and the resultant attack of poisoning, after the second operation I sank lower and lower, until the physicians practically abandoned all hope. And though I was kept in ignorance of their diagnostic conclusions I sensed the gravity of the situation both from my own feelings and from the mysterious actions of those about me; and every time I closed my eyes it was with a feeling of final submission to what seemed the inevitable. Death, which in the distance I had always pictured with unmitigated horror, seemed now to have lost much of its terror; and though its proximity gave me a ghastly feeling, in a way it appeared more like a messenger of relief than a harbinger of ill. Sometimes in my desultory sleep its phantom-like skeleton form seemed to move stealthily about the room, its sunken eyes steadily fixed upon me; and once I imagined it reposing beside me in the bed. The sensation was so shockingly uncanny that I involuntarily put out my hand; and fancy my astonishment when I awoke to find myself clutching the arm of the night nurse, whom I had startled out of a comfortable doze at my bedside!

On the fifth day it was decided that I had but a few hours left, and that a transfusion of mercurochrome was the last forlorn hope. It was a hazardous alternative and would either kill or cure in about forty minutes; but if it killed there was nothing to lose, for I was lost anyway; if it cured there was everything to gain. A well known physician, afflicted with septicemia in a neighboring hospital, had taken it the day before, and died in thirty minutes. My wife asked one of Doctor Will's assistants for his honest opinion on the probable outcome in my case; to which he answered, "He still has a fighting chance. If he doesn't die of uremic convulsions inside of forty minutes, he may recover."