When I came back to the world, the first thing I registered was the beeping. The slow but steady beep, beep, beep, was annoying, but not nearly as annoying as the floating feeling that ran throughout my body. As if I were on a cloud.
I didn't think of where I was or what I was doing, I only wanted to go back to sleep. I breathed in and out. It was difficult. My chest hurt and my throat was sore, causing me to cough a few times.
"Don't overdo it, buddy," a rusty male voice said somewhere in the distance. I felt a hand on my bare arm.
As my senses came back to me, one by one, I knew where I was before I opened my eyes. I pieced the fuzzy puzzle together.
I felt the rough fabric of the gown they'd placed on me. I felt something rough scratching my stomach, like a wire was poking me. I smelled the sterility of procedures and cleaning supplies, as well as the supplemental oxygen from the nasal cannula that tickled under my nose.
I forced myself to open my eyes.
I could immediately tell that I was in the intensive care unit of a foreign hospital. The room I had was large, a glass wall separating me from the nurse's station, the door open to the let the bustling of the nurses and doctors float through. The window on my left let in bright sunlight.
The beeping was coming from the monitor that was suspended from the ceiling beside my bed. Wires ran from my chest and out of my gown to a battery operated box that lay beside me, I assumed sending wireless heart pattern readings to the monitor.
Beside the monitor was Audi. He stared at me, looking almost as if he were in more pain and discomfort than I was in. Which was probably an easy task to accomplish, considering the fact that I had to be on drugs. I felt almost weightless.
I tried talking to Audi, tried to begin by saying hello, but my voice caught and I erupted into a weak fit of coughs.
"Easy there, Jai," he told me, leaning forward with that uneasy look in his eyes. Something was wrong, and it may or may not have fully been because of my poor condition. I sensed something more.
A nurse came rushing in when she heard me coughing. She had dark, long hair, and wore pink scrubs. "Hello, Jai," she greeted me, a thick Indian accent clouding her speech. "You've had an endotracheal tube in for the last two days to help you breathe, so you may not feel up for talking—"
"El," I croaked. She should have been at my bedside after whatever had happened to me. Where was she?
There went Audi's face again, dropping as if he had bad news he didn't want to deliver.
Audi leaned forward. "She's alright, son. Don't worry about her."
"Where...is she?" I asked, my throat scratching as I tried to suck air in. It was becoming more difficult. I tried raising up on my elbows, but the nurse put her hand on my shoulder and talked to me in an easy tone, causing me to lower myself back to the bed.
"She's alright, Jai. You suffered a bullet wound to one of your lungs, please try not to strain yourself. You obtained a pneumothorax as a result, and if you work too hard you will increase the chances of another lung collapse."
On the monitor over my head, the beeping quickened. The nurse took notice and told me she had some PRN meds to give me, although I didn't know what that meant.
El would know, if she were here. I knew that the answer was an easy one, but El would go on and on in detail about what it meant and why the nurse was giving them to me.
Where was she?
"Calm down, son," Audi begged. He only ever called me son when something bad was going on.
YOU ARE READING
Waters of Lethe, Book 2
RomanceI couldn't lie. Between the joy of Jai and the rush of taking someone else's life, as bad as it was, I was trying to wrap my head around things too.
