“Ifeelterrified.” She suckles on her bottom lip and stares straight past me to the door. With my back to the entrance, it’s almost as if she makes herself our watchman. “It’s exhausting, because I feel scared, but I don’t know what I’m scared of.”
“Normal, considering what you’ve been through.” I peel the suture pack open and lay everything out on the sparkling silver tray. “Our bodiesand minds have a way of protecting us. Your memory is struggling right now, but your nervous system knows some pretty big shit went down last night. It’s completely natural that you’re on edge, even if, logically, you’re safe.” I force myself into her line of sight and meet her wary eyes. “You’re bleeding right where I stitched you up, which means I need to take a look. Do you mind?”
She swings her attention to my tray, and the instruments laid out in order. Then she gulps.
“I can bring a nurse in. Or ten,” I offer. “If you’re uncomfortable with it just being me and you.”
“No, I?—”
“I mean, I can’tactuallybring ten nurses in. I don’t think we even have that many on staff. But I could head outside and wave a few folks down. They’d volunteer to supervise if that would help.”
“This is fine.” She carefully maneuvers to her side, plumping her pillow and tucking her hand beneath her cheek. Inhaling a shaky, shuddering breath, she presses her other hand to the side of my arm and shuffles me a full foot to the right.
Glancing over my shoulder, I understand her meaning—she wants to watch the door.
“C-can I ask you a question?” Her voice is raspy and broken. Rough and overworked. She exhales, her soft breath feathering my exposed forearm. “How come I can’t remember who I am, and I don’t remember getting stitches, but I know they hurt?”
“Well—”
“I don’t remember how I got here. I don’t even remember…” She closes her eyes, scrunching them tight. “It’s all dark. But I know how to talk.”
“Those are good questions.” I drag her sheet up to cover her curled legs and provide her a modicum of privacy, because then I pull her gown forward to reveal her ribs, inadvertently uncovering her backside.
Fortunately, the window is behind her, and there’s nothing out there but trees and mountains and one-way glass.
“We don’t quite know what we’re dealing with yet, since you’ve been awake for all of twenty minutes. But when a traumatic head injury leads to memory loss, we call it retrograde amnesia. Sometimes that means you can’t remember the incident that led to the trauma. Or maybe you don’t remember the last few weeks, or last year, or the lasttenyears.” Examining her wound, I count sutures—twenty-three perfect little knots in a row. But twenty-four, twenty-five, and twenty-six have torn the skin and left her lac open. “In some cases, a patient’s memories slowly return as their brain heals and everything calms down. In other, rarer cases, it’s possible a patient never gets them back. Either way, our memories are stored in aspecific area of our brain. You know how to walk and talk, and you can probably point to that television on the wall—” I hook a thumb over my shoulder, toward the tiny, boxy monstrosity bolted in the corner, “—and you could label it a television. You know you’re lying on a bed.” But I pause and peek up into her eyes. “Right? You know this is a bed?”
Swallowing, she nibbles on her lip and nods.
“Right. You know what a doctor is. What a hospital is. Dog. Cat. Car. Ball. If I give you a pencil and a book, you’ll know how to write words, and even how to spell those words. If you were fluent in another language before all this, you’ll be able to call upon that again.” I stop and smile. “Parli Italiano?”
She narrows her eyes. “I don’t speak Italian.”
“I optimistically disagree. You just understood me.”
“You said Italiano,” she sighs. “I inferred.”
“Oh, well…” Bested, I snicker. “Fair. I don’t speak more than those two words either. Walking, talking, reading… This is procedural memory, and it’s stored in your cerebellum. There are cases severe enough to wipe a patient’s procedural memory, but that’s far less common. Your episodic memory, on the other hand—which includes your name, your address, your relationships—hangs around in your hippocampus and temporal lobe. Your injury has disruptedthissection of your brain, and now, it needs time to heal.”
“Will I get them back?”
“Possibly.” I numb the area surrounding her wound with a quick injection that makes her hiss, then I set the syringe down and carefully pinch the skin back together. “Often, patients will regain most, if not all, of their memories. It could take a few days. Or a few weeks.” Glancing up, I search her wide, expressive eyes. “The good news is you’re able to createnewmemories. If you’d forgotten who I was in the time it took for me to grab supplies from the storeroom, then that would be much,muchworse.”
Her cheeks fire a warm, fiery pink. “You were only gone for a minute. I’m scared we didn’t test it properly, and I might forget you later.”
I’m kinda scared, too. Which is objectively insane.
Focus, Ollie!
“That type of amnesia is called anterograde, and it means there wassignificantbrain trauma. Though that could be temporary, too, and after allowing yourself time to heal, everything could go back to normal. What are your last memories?” I pick up my suture needle and gently tap her skin to make sure it’s numb. “Do you have anything stored away in there?”
“I don’t…” She frowns. “It’s like I’m looking through dirty glass. There’s stuff there, but I can’t make it clear.”
“I’ve seen interviews where some patients say it’s all black. Some say there’s nothing at all. Or like… radio static.” I slide the needle through her flesh and glance up to see if she reacts.She doesn’t.“Your dirty glass analogy is promising, don’t you think?”
“You sound unsure.” She looks past me to the door. “Are there older, more experienced doctors here?”
I choke out a laugh, my first since she came crashing through the ER doors late last night. Shaking my head, I tie a knot in the first stitch, cut the line with a fast snip, then I meet her eyes and know, beneath the fear and cageyness, is a woman who just cracked a joke.
