What will become of him - the nurses around him, coaxing and cajoling, and a procession of specialists in making breathing easier?
Is this where his life runs out - tracks leading to the edge of the cliff, each mile passed marked by a sometimes-small but always irreversible decline which brings that gasping engine and its train of rattling trucks inexorably to the instant of oblivion?
Or not?
Will his wife, in months to come, tell visitors to their home how nearly the crisis ended his life, and holding out her hand, reach for his and smile and say "but now he's never been better - isn't that right, my darling"?
I left him lying there, and I think I'll never rid my mind of seeing him on his bed, and beside him in a chair his wife, utterly drained, hollowed out and become a husk where hope had been and now has gone, and all that's left is loneliness.
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