Post by aloha on Jul 26, 2009 22:32:07 GMT -5
Aloha! Been watching the board for a while but never posted, decided to try my hand at writing. Amateur attempt, sorry. I wrote more but I don't want to spam the board with 30 pages.
----
I guessed we were going about 70 miles an hour or more because I could feel my scalp bashing into the thin pillow behind my head with every bump in the road. I could feel my teeth vibrating in my skull, which sounds like a weird thing to say, but I’ve been noticing all sorts of crazy sh*t these days on the parts of my body that I can still feel. I may not be able to feel anything from my shoulders down, but the rest of me has a catlike sensitivity. I’m like a superhero from the shoulders up. Or that’s what I tell the ladies.
“Hey, tell the driver to slow down,” I said to the paramedic sitting next to the stretcher I was lying on. “Does he want to get in an accident and cripple me?”
“Shut the f*ck up, Ethan,” John, the paramedic, said good-naturedly.
Every time I had to be transported anywhere, John was the one who did it so we sort of became buddies. He and I are pretty much as tight as one guy transporting another guy from hospital to hospital could get. These ambulance rides would be hell if not for me cracking jokes and John rolling his eyes at me.
This was going to be my last stop for a while though, or so I hoped, so John and I were going to have to say a tearful goodbye. In the four months since my injury, I’d been going from one life-threatening pneumonia to another life-threatening kidney infection, and now finally I was told I was out of the woods. After four months, I was finally declared “stable” which I’ve now decided is the best six letter combination in the English language. Six months ago, I probably would have said it was “ménage.”
After my trach finally (!) came out, there was a lot of discussion about what to do with me. I had what I thought was a great idea, but it turned out none of the pretty nurses wanted to take me home. So much for that. My mom said she couldn’t take me, not the way things were, and no rehab place would take me without a discharge plan. So that didn’t leave too many options left.
Mainly the social workers were talking about sending me to an old folks home. I wasn’t very excited about that. You might be fooled by my gray bushy beard, but I’m actually not that old. Actually, I’m only 19 (two months from 20). And I don’t really have a gray bushy beard. (Or a beard at all… as if they’d trim a beard for me in the ICU.)
Then the social worker brought up an idea that I liked a lot better, which was going to a children’s subacute hospital. Yes, even though I had pubes, I still counted as “a juvenile” because I was under 21. So I could chill at the subacute for a while, getting rehab, and presumably smoking some pot with the other teens, until either my mom could take me home or I could set things up to go home by myself. It didn’t sound so bad at all. Kind of fun, actually, like being back in summer camp.
The ambulance slowed down to the point where I no longer felt like I was getting a concussion from lying there, so I figured we were off the highway. “Are we there yet?” I asked John.
“No,” John said.
“How about now?”
“If you don’t shut up, we’re going to pull over and you’re going to have to walk the rest of the way there.”
It didn’t seem like we were too much further from the hospital, but we managed to get lost on the way there. Man, there is nothing like a little lost ambulance roaming the streets. At one point, John left me in the back while he went up front to help the driver figure out a map. I just lay there, trying not to think about how my nose kind of itched. One crappy thing about not being able to move my arms is not being able to scratch my face. I never realized I had such an itchy face until I got paralyzed. But usually if I kind of focused on the itch, it would slowly subside, probably better than if I actually scratched it. How very zen.
We made it to the children’s subacute only an hour behind schedule, which I know from having been transported several times, is freaking amazing. We must have been going at light speed. Seriously though, transports are really slow.
John unloaded the stretcher out of the back of the ambulance and out in front of the subacute, and I craned my neck to see it. Even though I didn’t have a halo or a cervical collar anymore, my neck was still pathetically weak, so I had trouble lifting it to get a better look, but it definitely seemed like a nice place. Quiet, small, peaceful. A great place to, like, write a novel.
“You okay, Ethan?” John asked me. He looked concerned, but I’m not sure why. I was psyched to be here, especially after the other places I could have ended up.
“I’m fine,” I assured him. “Let’s go inside. I’m probably freezing my ass off.”
They wheeled the stretcher inside and I got one more knock in the back of the head as we hit a bump in the sidewalk. Nice. The inside of the subacute was kind of dimly lit but still seemed relatively peaceful. I turned my head to the left and I could see a nursing station with lots of very cute girls in scrubs. Hubba hubba.
“Is this Ethan Mitchell?” one of the nurses asked as she got up off her chair. Where she was standing, her tits were practically at my eye level. I wasn’t complaining.
John nodded, “Yeah, I got his paperwork here.”
The sexy nurse took a thick manila envelope from John. In four months, I had accumulated a sh*tload of paperwork. The nurse actually grunted a little when she took the envelope.
“Put him in room five,” the nurse told John.
John wheeled me down the hall to a small room near the end. The bed near the door was taken, which meant I got the bed by the window. Score! The paramedic driving the ambulance joined John and the two of them lifted me from the stretcher into the bed. It’s lucky I lost like seventy pounds since my accident, considering how much other people had been lifting me. And I wasn’t exactly overweight to begin with. Now I probably looked like one of those starving kids that Sally Struthers was always trying to help.
I say “probably” because believe it or not, I hadn’t had the opportunity to see my reflection in quite a while. When you’re sitting in the ICU on a ventilator, there aren’t exactly people running to get you a mirror. Honestly, I was a little nervous. I mean, I wasn’t drop dead handsome before but I wasn’t hard on the eyes either. I know my face for the most part was intact, but I’m sure I didn’t look like I’d been skipping through a field for the last four months. I’d been near death about a hundred times and my guess was that I probably looked like sh*t. At the very least, I needed my hair washed. I had my head shaved when I got the halo put on, but now I actually had hair and it was greasy as sh*t.
John adjusted the pillow under my head, “You comfortable?”
“Sure,” I said. “Where’s my wheelchair?”
“It’s back at the hospital,” John reminded me.
“I don’t mean that sh*t chair,” I said. Since I was so sick at the hospital and didn’t get any real therapy, nobody bothered to get me a wheelchair I could actually operate myself. “I mean a power wheelchair.”
“I don’t know, buddy,” John said. “Soon, I bet. Don’t worry, you don’t get your chair and I’ll come over here and kick some ass.”
I laughed. I was going to miss John. Maybe he could come and transport me home when the time came.
This story is now continued on the stories page, www.paradevo.net/stories.html
----
I guessed we were going about 70 miles an hour or more because I could feel my scalp bashing into the thin pillow behind my head with every bump in the road. I could feel my teeth vibrating in my skull, which sounds like a weird thing to say, but I’ve been noticing all sorts of crazy sh*t these days on the parts of my body that I can still feel. I may not be able to feel anything from my shoulders down, but the rest of me has a catlike sensitivity. I’m like a superhero from the shoulders up. Or that’s what I tell the ladies.
“Hey, tell the driver to slow down,” I said to the paramedic sitting next to the stretcher I was lying on. “Does he want to get in an accident and cripple me?”
“Shut the f*ck up, Ethan,” John, the paramedic, said good-naturedly.
Every time I had to be transported anywhere, John was the one who did it so we sort of became buddies. He and I are pretty much as tight as one guy transporting another guy from hospital to hospital could get. These ambulance rides would be hell if not for me cracking jokes and John rolling his eyes at me.
This was going to be my last stop for a while though, or so I hoped, so John and I were going to have to say a tearful goodbye. In the four months since my injury, I’d been going from one life-threatening pneumonia to another life-threatening kidney infection, and now finally I was told I was out of the woods. After four months, I was finally declared “stable” which I’ve now decided is the best six letter combination in the English language. Six months ago, I probably would have said it was “ménage.”
After my trach finally (!) came out, there was a lot of discussion about what to do with me. I had what I thought was a great idea, but it turned out none of the pretty nurses wanted to take me home. So much for that. My mom said she couldn’t take me, not the way things were, and no rehab place would take me without a discharge plan. So that didn’t leave too many options left.
Mainly the social workers were talking about sending me to an old folks home. I wasn’t very excited about that. You might be fooled by my gray bushy beard, but I’m actually not that old. Actually, I’m only 19 (two months from 20). And I don’t really have a gray bushy beard. (Or a beard at all… as if they’d trim a beard for me in the ICU.)
Then the social worker brought up an idea that I liked a lot better, which was going to a children’s subacute hospital. Yes, even though I had pubes, I still counted as “a juvenile” because I was under 21. So I could chill at the subacute for a while, getting rehab, and presumably smoking some pot with the other teens, until either my mom could take me home or I could set things up to go home by myself. It didn’t sound so bad at all. Kind of fun, actually, like being back in summer camp.
The ambulance slowed down to the point where I no longer felt like I was getting a concussion from lying there, so I figured we were off the highway. “Are we there yet?” I asked John.
“No,” John said.
“How about now?”
“If you don’t shut up, we’re going to pull over and you’re going to have to walk the rest of the way there.”
It didn’t seem like we were too much further from the hospital, but we managed to get lost on the way there. Man, there is nothing like a little lost ambulance roaming the streets. At one point, John left me in the back while he went up front to help the driver figure out a map. I just lay there, trying not to think about how my nose kind of itched. One crappy thing about not being able to move my arms is not being able to scratch my face. I never realized I had such an itchy face until I got paralyzed. But usually if I kind of focused on the itch, it would slowly subside, probably better than if I actually scratched it. How very zen.
We made it to the children’s subacute only an hour behind schedule, which I know from having been transported several times, is freaking amazing. We must have been going at light speed. Seriously though, transports are really slow.
John unloaded the stretcher out of the back of the ambulance and out in front of the subacute, and I craned my neck to see it. Even though I didn’t have a halo or a cervical collar anymore, my neck was still pathetically weak, so I had trouble lifting it to get a better look, but it definitely seemed like a nice place. Quiet, small, peaceful. A great place to, like, write a novel.
“You okay, Ethan?” John asked me. He looked concerned, but I’m not sure why. I was psyched to be here, especially after the other places I could have ended up.
“I’m fine,” I assured him. “Let’s go inside. I’m probably freezing my ass off.”
They wheeled the stretcher inside and I got one more knock in the back of the head as we hit a bump in the sidewalk. Nice. The inside of the subacute was kind of dimly lit but still seemed relatively peaceful. I turned my head to the left and I could see a nursing station with lots of very cute girls in scrubs. Hubba hubba.
“Is this Ethan Mitchell?” one of the nurses asked as she got up off her chair. Where she was standing, her tits were practically at my eye level. I wasn’t complaining.
John nodded, “Yeah, I got his paperwork here.”
The sexy nurse took a thick manila envelope from John. In four months, I had accumulated a sh*tload of paperwork. The nurse actually grunted a little when she took the envelope.
“Put him in room five,” the nurse told John.
John wheeled me down the hall to a small room near the end. The bed near the door was taken, which meant I got the bed by the window. Score! The paramedic driving the ambulance joined John and the two of them lifted me from the stretcher into the bed. It’s lucky I lost like seventy pounds since my accident, considering how much other people had been lifting me. And I wasn’t exactly overweight to begin with. Now I probably looked like one of those starving kids that Sally Struthers was always trying to help.
I say “probably” because believe it or not, I hadn’t had the opportunity to see my reflection in quite a while. When you’re sitting in the ICU on a ventilator, there aren’t exactly people running to get you a mirror. Honestly, I was a little nervous. I mean, I wasn’t drop dead handsome before but I wasn’t hard on the eyes either. I know my face for the most part was intact, but I’m sure I didn’t look like I’d been skipping through a field for the last four months. I’d been near death about a hundred times and my guess was that I probably looked like sh*t. At the very least, I needed my hair washed. I had my head shaved when I got the halo put on, but now I actually had hair and it was greasy as sh*t.
John adjusted the pillow under my head, “You comfortable?”
“Sure,” I said. “Where’s my wheelchair?”
“It’s back at the hospital,” John reminded me.
“I don’t mean that sh*t chair,” I said. Since I was so sick at the hospital and didn’t get any real therapy, nobody bothered to get me a wheelchair I could actually operate myself. “I mean a power wheelchair.”
“I don’t know, buddy,” John said. “Soon, I bet. Don’t worry, you don’t get your chair and I’ll come over here and kick some ass.”
I laughed. I was going to miss John. Maybe he could come and transport me home when the time came.
This story is now continued on the stories page, www.paradevo.net/stories.html
