Olivia greets a man with dark hair, pressing a kiss to his cheek, but it’s Beckett I’m watching as he take a sea next to the man who could be James in forty years or so. The man, Thomas, holds his head in his hands, and then I begin to belatedly wonder why we aren’t standing around a hospital bed because this isn’t a hospital room. This is a room they put families when they have to break bad news.
I blink rapidly, though I can’t take my eyes off the two men on the chairs. His dad’s head rises, his gaze red and watery. I feel Heather’s arm tighten on my shoulder as she tries to get me to move, but I’m too busy trying to process what’s being said at the other side of the room.
He died. James died at the scene of the accident.
Like a judges gavel or the reaper’s scythe, the finality of this sweeps my legs from under me.
38
Miranda
‘This too shall pass.It sounds like something you’d say to a kidney stone.’
I close the magazine I wasn’t really reading, placing it on the bed. My comment goes unremarked upon.One day though, I know.
Traffic trundles past the window, the working hums of the hospital carries from the other side of the door. These sounds are all now as familiar to me as my own sigh.
‘Come on. You usually like my jokes.’
There comes no answer, just the stead rasp of his breath as I reach out and rub my fingers over the coarse golden hairs on his wrist.
James died on the last Saturday in September, on the most beautiful day of the autumn so far. His death was brief, and his guardian angel wore a uniform that day. She was there to save him when his body went into Ventricular Fibrillation. He was shocked twice before reaching the hospital. He died, and they brought him back to life, and for that, I have insufficient words to convey thanks.
The man I love, while on the way to attend the wedding of his best friend, met with a drunk driver in a side impact b pillar collision. In other words, James’s car was T-boned. The car was totalled, and didn’t fair much better when the fire crew arrived to cut him out.
He’s suffered three fractured ribs and an open tibia fracture with blood loss complications. But the more pressing concern was the subarachnoid haemorrhage as a result of his brain being battered against the walls of his skull on impact.
It’s almost impossible to describe the elation I felt as I’d discovered cI’d misread the situation in that bland little family suite on the side of the emergency room. Elation that turned to despair when Thomas and I were finally allowed to see him. At first, I didn’t believe it could be James—that there had been a mistake. He barely looked human, never mind like himself.
How could someone do this to him?
Swollen, bruised and battered, I wanted to hold him, comfort him, but I could barely reach him through the web of tubes and wires and monitors and IVs and other things I couldn’t even name.
I stood dumbfounded, silent tears streaming down my face. And then I realised I wasn’t the only one crying. Thomas stood next to me, sorrow etched in his face so acutely, I could only watch on.
No parent should have to see their child suffering.
The realisation was the prompt I needed. I wouldn’t allow our child to suffer my worry. And I would carry his—Thomas’s. I took the stranger’s hand in mine and together we approached the bed, waiting for someone to come and tell us what we could expect.
I didn’t know then, but he had been placed in a medical induced coma for the protection and control of the pressure dynamics of his brain.Who knew sleep really can make you heal? Or maybe that just too simplistic a view, especially as he’s still sleeping. But what do I know? I’m just a marketing manager who is in awe of the people who dedicate their lives to save lives.
‘Knock-knock. A blonde head appears around the half open door, halo of soft curls framing her sunny smile. Lisa is the first of the many people since September the twenty-eighth who’ve had a hand in saving James’s life. A paramedic, she was at the scene first. His guardian angel. The woman who brought him back.
‘I thought I’d just pop in and see how my favourite patient is doing.’ This isn’t the first time she’s called in to see us, each time bringing her very own brand of wry wit.
‘Your favourite, eh?’
‘Well, since about half-past two.’ She twists her wrist, glancing at the face of her watch. ‘When my original favourite left the building.’
Did I say wry wit? Maybe I meant a gallows type humour.
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ And a little appalled, but being a medical professional must, at some point, make you appeal a little ghoulish to those not in the trade. I can’t ever be upset with her, not after all she’s done, even if I have the sudden urge to cover his ears against more. ‘It must be awful when you lose a patient.’
‘Oh, I didn’t lose him, love. He just went home with his mum earlier today.’
Coming farther into the room, she does what everyone seems to do when they walk in here, and that’s lift then peruse the chart hanging from the bottom of his hospital bed. That’s professional and visitors both; everyone seems to be drawn to look. Though the nurses so do in a medical capacity, jotting down measurements after administering meds, checking vitals, and measuring urine output. But the poor girl who checked his catheter last actually winced before shooting me a strangled smile.
I’ve no idea what that was about.
