Ethan

When I opened my eyes, my head hurt something fierce and I could see a blinding light that was overwhelming to my eyes. It was as if I was staring directly at the sun or I had been in a dark cave and hadn’t seen light in years. Whatever it was. It hurt like hell, paired with my throbbing head, I wanted to go back to sleep. There it didn’t hurt and I was able to think. Right now I wasn’t able to think at all. I was trying my best not to lose it, when losing it felt like the thing to do.

I tried to open them again after I had learned to somehow deal with the throbbing in my head. It was constant and I was afraid to touch it, but first I had to figure out where I was.

It was pretty clear, pretty quickly that I was in a hospital. It wasn’t one that I recognized to be the one in Nome. I’d had my finger stitched up the second week I was there and I knew right away that I was not in Nome. But if I wasn’t in Nome, where was I?

Questions started to bombard me and I wanted to know how everyone was doing. Charlie was the last person that I’d seen and he wasn’t around. No one was. What was going on?

“Nurse. Nurse!”

My voice got louder as I called for the nurse to come. I had to know what was going on. I felt strange and when I tried to move, I found out that it was almost impossible to do so. I was sending the message, but it was moving slowly and everything hurt a little bit.

“Well look at you up finally. It’s about time sugar.”

I didn’t like the sound of that one bit. I knew that I had been out for a time, but it sounded like I had been out for a while.

“Where am I?”

“You’re in Juneau West dear. I’ve been praying for you. I said that you were too young to go out this way. I’m glad to see that you are up and you seem with it. We didn’t know if your brain was going to be scrambled or not.”

The shorter woman with blonde hair seemed nice enough, but what she said wasn’t computing. I still couldn’t think of why I was here, then I remembered it all and I remembered the secondary collapse that came down on me. I was trying to help someone else, but now I didn’t know if he made it out of there or not.

I asked her some questions about everything and Nurse Jane told me what she knew. She promised to go find out the rest of it for me and to get the doctor. I found out that I had been out for almost four months. It was a long time, longer than I could have ever imagined. It also helped me to realize how close to death I must have been.

No one was around and I was a little disappointed that Denise wasn’t around. I asked the nurse about her and she said that there hadn’t been anyone there by that name as far as she knew. It wasn’t at all what I wanted to hear.

“There have been several people that come regularly though. I will give them a call. Said it was your parents and your finance.”

I didn’t have one of those, but I used to. Sandy and me broke up before I came to Nome. Surely they didn’t mean her, huh? Me and Sandy were through and had been for a while, though I wouldn’t put it passed my mom to want to rekindle things between us. She always did like Sandy; sometimes I thought that she liked her more than me. She was the daughter that she’d never had.

When the nurse came back, she was with the doctor and I got the details that the nurse was hesitant to tell me or didn’t know herself. The doctor did a couple of test and declared that there didn’t seem to be any brain damage. That sounded like good news to me, but I asked him why I was finding it hard to get up and move around.

“You haven’t used some of your muscles in months Ethan. It’s going to take time and you’re going to need a lot of physical therapy. It’s going to be a hard road, but I have a feeling if you can pull through this than you can pull through anything. You’re going to make a full recovery and that’s what you have to focus on. You’re a lucky man.”

When he left I looked around and I have to say that I didn’t feel all that lucky. I felt like I had been hit with a shovel repeatedly and then buried alive. It wasn’t a feeling that I’d felt before and I’d been hurt plenty of times before, but it never felt this bad. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do, but it was going to be a while until I was going to be able to get out of bed and leave, which is what I wanted to do at the moment. I hated hospitals and I hated being stuck in bed even more.

I tried to call Denise because she was who I wanted to talk to, but her phone number was coming back as disconnected. I didn’t like that I couldn’t get a hold of her. I needed to talk to her and I wanted to make sure that she was okay. I’d been gone far too long.

I didn’t have much time to think about it though because my parents were coming in and Sandy was with them.

“What the hell is she doing here mom? You know we broke up, right?”