"WHATTHEFUCK?!"
The unsuspecting man jumps back, loses
his balance, and rolls out of the chair. The egg roll he was snacking on plops
to the floor. Grunting and gasping, the large man spins on his knees. His face
is pale and frightened.
"I…I need s…s…some help," Tracy says again, backing
away. She is starting to shake. Her knees feel weak. Perhaps she really is
injured, she thinks, and looks down at her chest again. Looking for a wound.
Looking beneath the dried, stinking blood for the wound that was just there.
The nurse gets to his feet and, not
taking his eyes off the bloody corpse of a woman, grabs the phone, punching in
a code without having to look.
"She’s up... The woman...! Who was
shot... She's up... She's here... I DON'T KNOW... NOW! Fucking NOW!"
He drops the phone, not looking as it
tumbles back into the cradle, and tries to adjust his face and comport himself.
Shockers happen every day, and with experience he’s gotten used to surprising
situations.
"Honey, what happened to you? Ma’am,
you didn't have a pulse. Are you okay. We need to get you laying down, over
here... that's right, just relax." He comes around the nurse's station,
and guides Tracy
to another gurney, this one with no sheet, thrown into the corner. This is
obviously part of the emergency room that doesn't see a lot of business.
As she braces a hip and maneuvers herself
onto the gurney the nurse reaches out a foot to pop the brake. Tracy notices that the nurse's large hands
have been guiding her, without actually forming any contact. Perhaps Tracy had found the one
nurse who didn't like blood. Or touching.
Before she's fully situated on the gurney
a frantic looking, Dougie-looking doctor rushes up. He reaches for a pen and clicks it half a dozen
times before he is satisfied that the ball point is prepared to write, then
realizes he has no chart.
“Mrs… Ma’am,” he begins shakily, patting
his chest for his stethoscope. Because that is the only way to tell if someone
has a heartbeat after you’ve attended medical school.
“Let’s see. Nurse?” he demands, popping
the eartips in his ears, and placing the drum on Tracy ’s chest with a tentative hand.
“I don’t know, doctor. She just appeared.
Out of nowhere.”
“Where is her chart?” The young doctor
straightens, and asserts his authority. He looks older for a moment.
There is a flutter of action as more
nurses and other scrub clad personnel appear. She notices that everyone is
talking at once, no one is listening to each other, and no one seems to be able
to finish a sentence.
Very quickly she is turned with
proficient hands and made to lie flat. The sides of the gurney are popped up,
and the contraption jerked down a corridor, into an actual emergency room. They
had pushed her off into an unused hallway, the morgue was supposed to be on
their way.
After hours, tedious hours, cold, sticky,
and stinky hours, Tracy
is being brought back to life on paper and admitted to a hospital room.
The doctors are baffled and blame the
paramedics, "Why did you bring an uninjured person to the emergency room
by ambulance?"
The paramedics have no answer.
Everyone refers to their notes. It is a
mystery that some are calling a miracle.
All her life Tracy has known that if she keeps her head down
long enough, she doesn’t have to say anything at all, and eventually people
take their questions to the other side of doors, and into hallways instead of directing
them towards her.
The hospital is no exception.
She thinks about her animals with a
start, but then decides that they will be fine until she can go home in the
morning. There will be a mess to clean up, but messes aren’t that big of a
deal.
She will use lotion in the morning, when
she gets home, she thinks, and put that thought aside with the others as she
turns her head and sleeps, and wonders what dreams will bring her tonight. What
dreams will come?
“Good Morning, dear!”
A cherubic nurse waddles in, greeting Tracy brightly.
After the avid nurse takes her blood
pressure, temperature, and listens to her chest and her back with yet another
stethoscope, she rolls the bed tray over and proudly presents breakfast.
It’s not too bad for hospital standards,
but Tracy
sticks to the bacon and toast. The coffee is hot, and that is refreshing. A few
sips and she is ready to face the day.
It is six hours of pacing the room, in
borrowed scrubs, with hospital issued socks before she is discharged. She wanted
to just walk away, but fear of upsetting the system kept her in the sterile
room until her release could be sorted out.
It is possibly the strangest discharge in
history, since she has no sign of physical trauma, no injuries, no wounds. But
each nurse, doctor, and intern implores her to call if she has any problems,
any symptoms at all. They seem to beg and wish for a symptom that will explain
the anomaly of a dead gunshot victim waking up with a pulse and no wound.
Tracy herself isn't baffled at all, but
she does struggle to accept that her adventures with Dikko, and the things she
learned, are based in reality. She's always been very pragmatic about matters
of spirituality. Hands of Joy
Lutheran Church
hasn't ever challenged her views, and she attends each Sunday by rote.
Dikko seems to be a god or angel, she's
not sure. And the more time that passes, the less detail she can remember
specifically. Perhaps it really was all a dream.
No comments:
Post a Comment