Hey Mr. Tambourine Man

But that's not even close to the most remarkable conversation I've had this week. That privilege goes to my latest co-intern, a boy with a disarming smile, and an almost ridiculously filmy back-story with a rags-to-riches spin to it.

In the spirit of our 'Too Much Information To Handle' conversations, he leaned over conspiratorially over the three bottles of Sterilium that separated our workstations and loudly whispered, "You know, ever since I was a kid, I wanted to learn to smoke. And two years ago, I actually did!"

His stage whisper alerted me to the thought that he probably wanted me to be either really shocked or really impressed. I, therefore, decided it was best to neglect to mention that he wasnt the only one with a fun tale of trysts with cancer sticks.

So, I let him proceed with his 'secret' outpourings. "I smoked for a month, one cigarette a day. And I really liked it! It made me feel so, so, umm.."

"Uninhibited?" I supplied.

"Free." he smiled back.

"So if you liked it, how come you quit in a month? To test your moral fortitude?" I had to ask, struggling hard to stop the question sounding as cruelly sarcastic as it obviously does.

"Well, I thought, what wud my dad think? He wud be hurt if he knew, and I wud have to tell him. He wud think his son's going bad." he shrugged.

"Yeah, becoz all the boys from your village are good Marathi boys who dont smoke, right?" I said rather distractedly, as the distinctive smell of formalin wafted in through the window.

"Oh come on, Karishma, we're both not that stupid. And we've seen enuff people here to know that every person who isnt a smoker is not automatically a good person. One bad quality does not indicate the presence of other worse ones, and one good quality cannot compensate for the absence of many better ones." His face momentarily clouded over before his genuine, boyish smile shone through instants later and he giggled before adding in another theatrical whisper, "You know what I've always wanted to try though? Ganja!"

A Dangling Conversation (if ever there was one..)

Internship is turning into a real goldmine of life experiences, all of a sudden.

I've spent the last fortnight in a relatively mildly irritating posting in a unit run by a registrar who until today I'd put down as a moderately effective, watered-down sort of a dictator. A stickler for punctuality, a nitpicking nag, that kind of a person. Not remotely a malicious bitch so much as a typical trope, instead of a real person, I thought. She was often short with patients, frequently snapped at her clueless but kindhearted housemen, relentlessly ordering them to get their act together, she was painfully particular about us turning up in the wards at 7 AM to do blood collections, only if there were just two patients that needed to be tested. The only time there appeared to be anything to humanize her stony countenance was the few occasions when she presented cases to the professors, an activity that in the Psychiatry department involves having long, sometimes really ridiculously silly-sounding conversations with patients. Her histories were detailed and thorough, her cases peppered with witticisms and a somewhat wacky sense of humour, that was decidedly at odds with her otherwise apparently hostile demeanour.

I was glad to be finishing the posting really. Just take her signature and get the hell out of there, I thought.

Then, it so turned out that we didnt really need her signature, the saccharine sweet lecturer and the histrionically entertaining professors were ready to sign all our work.

So, in what felt like a minor coup, we paraded into the office, stamping our own logbooks with the department seal and there she was! My co-interns all thought the best strategy was obviously to not look her in the eye, and simply troop past trying to look as innocuous as possible, as if willing themselves to be invisible cud actually work.

I, however, am more than a little worse at that, and blending into the background wont ever really be a strong suit for me. So, I thought that I shud use that to my advantage and contribute a cheeky parting shot instead.

So, trying to look her in the eye with what I hoped resembled bonhomie, I gave her a big smile and I said, "Ma'am, so we're done with psych. Today was our last day." 'And you wont be able to boss us around any more.' being what was left pointedly unsaid.

She looked at me, as if really noticing me for the first time in that very moment, and to my great surprise, smiled, although sardonically, and said, "Then I guess you're lucky. Do well in your exams." before turning and leaving.

My co-interns gave me a 'why do you always have to do this, Karishma?' look and marched into the office. I, however, realized that I was seeing the woman in a whole new light, and a really rosy one, too.

It dawned on me that she was probably the only rigorously competent person in the whole unit, the reason we were called on for blood collections daily was becoz the sweet but simpering houseman had no idea what bore needle to use, or what bulbs to take, or even which laboratory the blood was supposed to be sent to. That the other gruff but kindly houseman was bad at remembering drug names and repeatedly badgered the registrar for dosages.

That the honey-tongued lecturer often left rounds half-way and the much-renowned professor was on holiday for much of the month.

She was single-handedly responsible for all the patients in the unit and the obvious stress from all that work was probably what made her lose her temper so often.

And I realized what I really felt was not exhilaration at having gotten another barrage of signatures out of the way, but the slightest hint of guilt towards and a somewhat grudging admiration for the woman who delightedly wrote words like 'mendicants' and 'verbose' and 'lotuseaters' on the case-sheets, a woman whose name I hadnt even bothered to ask for all of the two weeks I was posted alongside her.

What's past is prologue

For the third time in the five years that I've been studying to be a doctor, this city gets bombed by terrorists. This time I feel better equipped to deal with the casualties but as luck wud have it, a relatively lighter posting had me heading home in the middle of terrible traffic the same time as news of the blasts started to filter thru.

I was on a completely different route, of course, but one cudnt help but get infected by the panic in the air on the roads today.

After making several futile attempts to call mum and dad on their cellphones on jammed networks, my driver suggested we switch on the radio where helpful RJs told us about the location of the blasts, the condition of traffic on the roads, what routes to avoid, and where brand new checknakas had sprouted up.

So a usually forty-minute long ride morphed into a two hour-long odyssey punctuated by frequent text messages asking me if I was home and safe, all the while I was frantically trying to call mum and dad.

With the radio our only source of reliable information we had it switched on the whole time and as reassuring messages from family and friends started pouring in, so did news about patients pouring into our hospital, when this unexpected song started playing on the radio.

And for a few minutes I was dumbfounded. The ridiculous optimism of the song sounded hopelessly and naively out-of-place in these dangerously cynical times.

But in those minutes, I realized that this song was from another time and place. That it was recorded in a city which had never been laid siege to, in a country that had not gone to war against its neighbour numerous times, by idealistic people who had believed that the battle for freedom had really been won. Once and for all. And that the beautiful, peaceful utopia they'd dreamed up wud come to exist in the future, that their children wud inherit this vision of a perfect world.

And then the song ended, the next song played, and it was "Bombay Meri Jaan" and what cud I do, but wistfully change the channel? It was the only way to stop the past from seeming like some sort of paradise, to stop feeling that now, whenever the world changes, it is always only for the worse.

Last place you looked

And thus it ends, what must be one of the singularly most frustrating and strangely fulfilling postings of my internship. Assisting the BMC pull off what must be a rather childishly futile PR exercise, against our will, shunted from real clinical postings, to act as default blood collectors in the freshly created Fever OPD in daily twelve hour shifts for 15 straight days without Sundays off, or any other day off for that matter, really puts some things in perspective.

That spending twelve hours with someone at a stretch, chattering about Delhi Belly and Kishore Kumar over mechanically sticking needles into people's veins does create a rather unexpectedly strong bond of friendship with your fellow intern. That spending five years attending lectures in the same class as this person will teach you nothing about them while spending fifteen harrowing days with them will fill you in on everything from their boyfriend's favourite flavour of ice-cream to their favourite boy-band from the nineties.

Also, long nights spent chit-chatting with the first really sweet and warmly human registrar (she even bought us three scoops of ice-cream on our last day of work) I've met in KEM so far are well worth the endless hours of thankless hopelessly boring work. There's nothing like strife and loneliness to teach you to appreciate the goodness inside of other people, the kindness of strangers that goes unnoticed on ordinary days.

Isnt it just incredible that friends really can be found in the most trying of times and in the strangest of places?

One more time

So, umm, this is the customary birthday post all about this particular birthday. I am starting to get a bit bothered by the amount of these that keep stacking up but well, each year is quite a different experience from the one before, so I dont think they're all that pointless.

There have been quite a few years in the recent past when I've been trying to do the grown-up thing and just stay home having a nice dinner and spending quality time with friends and family. But somehow it always turns into this raucous milestone thing - hey, you're 21 now, let's go get beer! Or, hey, look you earn now - let's go to a fancy place to celebrate.

But this year, for reasons rather beyond my control, I think I shall end up getting the mature birthday that I'd always wished to have. With Piyu's eternal altercation with assorted viruses continuing into this year as well, it's just going to be an intimate dinner at her place after all, with movies on the DVD player and four big bowls of buttered popcorn.

And as against bunking lectures and going out for cake like always, today I woke up bright and early and went to work in the OPD, to examine patients and prescribe for them. It was like every other day at work, but I just felt so much more enthusiastic and cheerful than usual. Which for me is really saying something.

And finally, mum's gift to me was a gorgeous red Kanjeevaram silk saree, almost exactly like the one she has, one I have been coveting for several years. There's something special about the way this is the year that she thinks I am finally old enuff to get one.

Growing up can be a tricky, and sometimes, messy business. You must allow yourself to accept that you will make mistakes, while simultaneously trying to learn from them to avoid making more as you grow older. That is the very essence of lessons learned throughout this particular Psychiatry posting. Mistakes will be made. The way you deal with the fallout makes all the difference. Some people give up and others break down, while there are those that will just get up, brush themselves off and keep up the good fight. Maybe I'll know for sure what kind I am by this time next year.

Whatever the answer to that is, I hope that I'll be alright with it. That's what birthdays are for. We're all growing old all the time, every moment of our lives, inching slowly towards death. But one day every year, all of that catches up with us quite all of a sudden when we're busy chalking up another year of life wrapped up.

Irrespective, introspection must be one of the actual benefits of having a birthday. Like getting free beer from friends is. Boy, it sure feels great to be a grown-up! :D

Lessons in Humanity.

When I was eight years old, my dear Aunt Bhanu had given me a birthday present that was a big box full of five illustrated and abridged versions of classic books. Now these weren't your regular books for kids, not Oliver Twist or Treasure Island or The Prince & The Pauper. These were slightly odd books to be giving to an eight year old. They were Jules Verne's Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Journey to the Centre of the Earth, H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and of course, my then least favourite - Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

It was reading these books perhaps that ignited my life-long fascination with science-fiction and more-so with morbidity.

I dont think their impact wud have been as great had they been the regular unabridged novels read without illustrations that I acquired in my teens, in my attempt to recapture the sense of wonder I had first felt when reading them.

The illustrations had been singularly excellent, and some scenes just stuck fast in my head. I still remember them as vividly as if I had the pages in front of me, alas, the books are lost to me now. Given away to classmates as grown-up novels took precedence or borrowed by younger cousins and not returned.

My mind's eye returns to me certain images though, and I can imagine them even today, my memory perhaps embellishing on what I had originally seen.

A large tear glistening on the hard brown cheek of the enigmatic Captain Nemo's usually stern, shuttered face as the mysterious young man with a hole in his skull, covered by blood-soaked bandages lay dying on a bunk in the background.

The explorers sailing on makeshift rafts, battling against violent storms, lost in a vast ancient underground sea filled with some magnificent and some monstrous fish.

Count Dracula, his long black cape whipping in the wind as he scared off hungry wolves with a snarl and a wave of a sinewy clawed hand as Jonathan watched wide-eyed from the carriage window.

The Time Traveller, adventurous yet afraid, shrinking from the Morlocks in the dark tunnels, realizing that the menacing creatures are the descendants of the downtrodden working classes of the distant past.

They were all stories that touched something inside my eight-year old heart and moved me to wonder, and sometimes fear.

But Frankenstein perplexed me. I did not know what to make of it. I did not know if I felt sympathetic towards the Creature or repulsed by him. I didnt know if I blamed Viktor Frankenstein or if I pitied him. But the haunting image of the Creature, who having received nothing but beatings and tauntings, longingly looking in through the window at a happy family eating a warm dinner around a simple wooden table, thinking how he would always, always be the outsider, shunned and reviled, lingered uncomfortably in the dark corners of my mind.

Tonight, I watched a screening of Danny Boyle's brilliant new play based on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, at the NCPA, and I watched it alone as my erratic schedule and busy weekends wud allow.

I dont really watch movies or plays alone. I enjoy them as the communal experience they were probably meant to be, before home theatre systems and personal computers arrived. I am usually the obnoxious person in the audience who regularly gets shushed by people for whispering too loudly to my friend sitting next to me. So this was my first time watching this play all by myself, in a corner seat at the extreme right of the second row.

And while the staff at NCPA are always and extremely courteous, they seemed to take special care in showing me to my seat, literally walking me to it and asking if I was alright, probably becoz I was a girl who'd showed up all alone. They even seated three delightfully chatty old Parsee ladies next to me!

But perhaps it was appropriate that all my thoughts about this marvellous play were confined to the solitude of my own mind becoz perhaps that's the lesson that I needed to learn from it.

Of course, the play with the fantastic ensemble cast of Jonny Lee Miller as the hard-hearted Frankenstein, Naomi Harris as the compassionate Elizabeth and the always-wonderful Benedict Cumberbatch in a strangely moving performance as Frankenstein's Monster is chock-full of subtle and not-so-subtle messages if you'll look for them.

Everything from the Biblical idea of Original Sin, the onslaught of science in the modern age, the grave consequences of hungering for power without responsibility, the hypocrisy of society, men trying to play God, slavery, love, loneliness, poetry, childhood and its innocence lost to the very nature of the human condition is covered in the sparklingly witty dialogue of the play. And inspite of the frequent ideological heavy-lifting required of it, the lines of dialogue pronounced by the excellent actors crackle with surprising humour and comic whimsy in a way they never did on the page.

The play may be about a lot of things but at its centre lies the relationship between the man and his creation. And how that creation, abandoned by his 'father', is quickly and brutally taught several lessons about humanity and human beings.

We sense every emotion that passes quicksilver-like on the grotesque face of the Creature - his struggle with his newly given life at the beginning of the play, his abandonment by his creator, his pleas for help as he begs for food, his cries of pain as he is mercilessly whipped, his joyful exultation when he watches the first sunrise of his life, his shrinking from a gentle old blind man's touch, his introduction to music and books by this old man who becomes a very obvious father figure, his sonorous recitations of the poetry he comes to adore, his tender longing for a lover, his violent anger at being rejected and taunted by the very people he silently helped, his heart-breaking anguish at being the only one of his kind, and his cynical but truthful observations on mankind are incredibly and brilliantly rendered by Benedict Cumberbatch (whom I loved as Sherlock Holmes on BBC's new series), and it is a bit of a shock when the actor turns up in his natural handsome avatar at the end of the play.

Also in a stunning reversal from the book, the Creature becomes the hero of the story, so much more than the monster that prowled at the shadowy edges of Viktor Frankenstein's rather eventful life. We experience all that happens from the Creature's perspective. And this is probably where the play triumphs most of all. The Creature becomes a mirror that displays all our flaws back to us, ruthlessly and relentlessly. We tell ourselves we're good people and we'd have been better to him had we encountered him, but there's that nagging doubt at the back of our mind.

We realize that we are indeed guilty of all the crimes he accuses mankind of. We are afraid of what we do not understand, we treat with hatred and hostility those who are not like us, we do not keep all our promises, we are cruel, even and especially to those whom we profess to love. We corrupt the innocent, we exploit the weak, we undermine the strong, we despise the truly good.

The Creature, we learn, is born a somewhat gentle soul, a lover of beauty, nature, and poetry, with a tender heart that is capable of kindness to children and love for mankind.

He desires a bride he may love and keep as his own friend and companion. But Frankenstein cannot keep this terrible promise and destroys her. The Creature exacts revenge as he rapes and murders Frankenstein's wife on their wedding night, cynically declaring "Now I am a real man!" to the grief-stricken Frankenstein who chases after him endlessly to finally destroy his creation.

The play ends as the book does at the North Pole, where the Creature admits to Frankenstein that he feels remorse for Elizabeth's death and admits that he always yearned for his creator's love. Frankenstein confesses that he was incapable of loving and that he envied the Creature's ability to feel love, which made him more human than Frankenstein wud ever be.

And I understood the real reason Bhanu Mami had told me it was important that I read this book properly. She had always known that it was Frankenstein who was the real outsider, and not the Creature. But perhaps, this was a lesson I needed to learn in a darkened auditorium, as three hundred other people collectively drew in their breath at the ending. That, in truth, each one of us is all alone, but those of us who can manage to reach out to another person will never really be lonely.

Dance me to the End of Love

Miriam: There's one thing I want from you.

Barney: Anything!

Miriam: Don't answer 'anything'. That's not real. Life's real. It's made up of little things. Minutes, hours, naps, errands, routine - and it has to be enough.

- from the movie, Barney's Version.

Say

What Iris Murdoch once said, or rather what Kate Winslet as Iris Murdoch said in the movie Iris gets one thinking about the exact significance of language.

It may be the one of the best reasons human beings have been as successful as they are as a species so far, but one wonders if its cardinal purpose of communication is served exactly.

Often, people dont say what they really want to say either becoz they think it's not the right thing to say or becoz they dont think they are equipped with the necessary vocabulary to express in words exactly what thoughts form near wordlessly in their minds.

Sometimes people talk in abstractions becoz details cannot, must not be given away. Other times people talk to distract from the truth, or to dilute it, or to embellish it.

To capture a feeling in a few words or a thousand is challenging even for those who love words and self-expression as much as Iris does, or as much as I think I do.

And since words are never enuff, language becomes something lesser then originally intended. Especially becoz people dont use it only for conveying meanings and points. It is a medium of communication, yes, but more often it ends up being about avoidance, misdirection, self-protection and mostly plain confusion.

And the truth probably is that people often talk simply becoz they have nothing to say.

But then, as Iris points out, what else do we have? Unless evolution turns us all into telepaths, and that wud be way more curse than blessing.

"There's something fishy about describing people's feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. But they're important to us, nonetheless, because they are what connects us to thoughts other than those belonging to us."- Iris Murdoch

Sin, Sin, Sin

Hospitals are excellent places to take notes on the best and the basest of human nature.

How the human condition incorporates the contradictions inherent in a life which ends as it must but the loss causes grief all the same, though we know something that does not die is not truly alive.

How human society tolerates and stipulates that some people's egos are worth more than some other people's lives.

How it is perfectly acceptable that a fatal error is excusable becoz it is an error, and not a mistake. So that a technicality can smoothen the rigidity of thought over the splinters and shards of a conscience that must have been ripped to shreds.

How it is essential and even praiseworthy to be unemotional, and near inhuman becoz it is the exact useful way of allowing reason and learning to take a judgment call. Becoz allowing yourself to actually feel wud be unbearable.

How knowing that each day, out there in the world, terrible things happen to people and more terrible things will come to pass, that things are much worse for others than they cud possibly be for you, does absolutely nothing to lessen the burden of your own personal tragedy.

P. S. Twelve-hour shifts in an emergency room have taken over the last two months of my life. Writing these posts makes actually ruminating on all that happens easier to deal with, almost like preserving one's sense of peace (since saying sanity wud be closer to the truth but even more close to being hysterically dramatic).

Nowhere to Run

A few months ago, I set myself the task of watching every single Martin Scorsese movie I cud possibly lay my hands on. I started with the easiest ones- Shutter Island, The Departed, The Aviator, Gangs of New York, then I moved on to an unlikely Marty movie called The Age of Innocence simply becoz it starred the beautiful Daniel Day-Lewis who I kind of had a crush on ever since watching Gangs of New York, then I got to The Last Temptation of Christ on Easter fittingly, and last night I saw Taxi Driver, which I thought was my favourite, if I had to pick one at all.

Talking this idea over with B., he told me to watch Bringing Out the Dead for two reasons. One, he said it echoes Taxi Driver though I had no idea what he meant by that, and the second, becoz he thought I'd be able to relate to it. Turns out that he's right on both counts.

I've never seen Bringing Out the Dead before and quite frankly I did not expect to be so deeply moved by it when I read about it. It's about a New York paramedic named Frank, played by Nicolas Cage, who's spent night after night for five years roaming the streets in an ambulance, dispatched to save dying people who need help on an emergency basis. Frank is actually really good with people, he wants to save their lives and does the best he possibly can.

But he is possessed by the idea that for the last six months, he has not successfully saved a single one of the people he gets called out to help and he increasingly feels like his real job is not saving lives but bringing out the dead. He tries to get out of his job by any means he can think of. He starts to drink on the job, calls in sick, turns up late for shifts, anything, anything to avoid having to face the next person who he's certain will die on his watch. To add to his deepening misery, he is haunted by the ghost of a young woman he tried to save one night but cudnt. Now almost every hour of every night he sees the spectre of her staring at him, on the streets, through windows in restaurants, in the emergency room. Frank all but admits his sickness, he knows that he is coming apart at the seams.

And he's not the only one we watch who we suspect is losing their mind. The ambulance drivers on every shift alternate between a man who drives like the best way to reach an accident is by causing an accident and a man who wallops a defenseless loon on the street with a baseball bat, out of sheer frustration.

The movie follows Frank on three nights, from Friday night until Sunday morning and the Biblical reference is immediately obvious. But one wonders if there is any redemption or resurrection to be found on Sunday, or if it's just a temporary respite from an endless cycle of horrors that begins again on Monday night.

And I think I get how this movie 'echoes' Taxi Driver. Travis Bickle also drove thru streets saving people, the only difference was, he saved people who didnt call for help. Frank, on the other hand, attempts to save those who're struggling to live, but all he can do is helplessly bear witness to their deaths. He cynically calls himself 'a grief mop'.

Whatever he may say, we can see that Frank cares about this job. He's actually good at it. He knows how to handle the confusion and chaos surrounding a man who's had a heart attack at the dinner table at home, how to reassure the girlfriend of a junkie who has overdosed in the toilet of a night-club, how to deliver twins in a dingy room in an abandoned building when the Mexican immigrant mother is so far in denial that she claims she's a virgin and the birth is a miracle, how to scare a homeless man who slashes his wrists every other week, into never trying to commit suicide again. He even throws himself off a balcony trying to save a drug dealer who's jumped off the roof, although he admits a part of him wanted to go down along with the unfortunate man.

As gloom and doom as this movie may sound, it is actually pretty darkly funny in the way it treats its life versus death moments, like in a fabulous scene in which a man dies imagining that sparks from a welder's blowtorch are fireworks against the sky. Also it is extremely visually arresting. The whole movie looks like a vivid acid trip with the camera turning ninety degrees in a matter of seconds and staying like that for minutes as scenes play out with the red and blue lights of the ambulance flashing rapidly, Frank's face alight with manic desperation. The soundtrack spews songs at us, that seem completely incongruous at first, but are a perfect fit in some twisted and wickedly funny way. For example, when Frank walks out of a lift onto a blood-stained floor, the song that plays in the background is hilariously, 'Red, Red Wine'. Nicolas Cage himself is awesome as a man teetering at the edge of the abyss, on the brink of insanity, slowly but surely losing his footing, his blue eyes filled with a world of hurt, his pain starkly visible etched all over his pallid face.

Frank riding in his ambulance to and from his hospital reminded me of the mythical boatman on the River Styx charged with ferrying the souls of the dead to the underworld, the steam rising from the manholes cud be smoke from hellfire. New York looks unusually and incredibly grimy, so unlike the summery glittering clean city that is the backdrop for Woody Allen movies.

And unlike what the American dream may tell you, there are many, many lost souls here. Beggars near subway stations, the homeless underneath bridges, illegal immigrants in hovels, crack addicts in crumbling buildings. These are the people Frank tries to save every night and we understand why he's fighting a losing battle. In my favourite scene, the daughter of the first patient we saw him resuscitate tells him that only the toughest of people can survive in this city. Frank shakes his head slowly and says, "No, the city doesn't discriminate. It gets everyone. We're all dying here." And we know that he's right.

And I had an instant sense of recognition every time the action shifted to the Emergency Room of the hellishly overcrowded hospital at night, on the rare occasions that Frank does manage to rescue someone from certain death, with the all-too-familiar (to me) characters of the harassed looking doctor, unhappy to be stuck here at night but trying to do his best without yelling himself hoarse, the nurse who knows the first names of all the "regular" patients and is as kind as she can be, the security guard who deals roughly but efficiently with drunk brawlers and high-as-a-kite junkies, the pizza guy who delivers pizza after midnight from an all-night pizza place and who points out the visible irony in calling a night shift at a hospital, a 'graveyard shift'. There's the same old medication trolley, the same ventilator beeps, the bloody gauze rolls and the same tubing and syringes. If I cud smell the movie, I'm sure I'd know that smell. Every hospital emergency room in the world is exactly the same, in all probability. I kept thinking how this could be the same place that I worked once a week, populated by pretty much the same people.

The ending is at dawn on Sunday morning when Frank falls asleep as the sun rises, after what he claims felt like months of staying awake. He feels like he's broken the endless cycle of death by finally having saved a life and now, he can get back to his job which he does so well, a job that is never, ever over.