Educational Experience

Part III--Chapter 14

Out of the frying pan, into the fire. But there are some welcome surprises in store, too...

So, about four days into my recovery, my body turned into a furnace.

I was still too weak to ring the little red button to call the nurse, so they didn't discover it until the night nurse came in to check on me late that night and found me shivering and sweating like crazy. My bed was soaked. And I felt like I was freezing but my temperature was "Get the body bag ready" high.

So the nurse went flying out of there to grab the first doctor she could lay hands on. Which was a young woman who ran in and threw the covers off me, and started checking me over from head to toe.

I passed out when she started messing around with my belly. This knife sharp pain shot straight through me and then, blackness. Total. Until I woke up all groggy and after surgery the next day sometime.

You wouldn't actually call it waking up, though, if you'd been there. I was conscious, but just barely.

And I heard this male voice saying, "...tiny nick in the rear wall. The seepage caused the infection. And I'm not going to sugar coat this. Infections of this kind can be particularly difficult to treat. Especially when they go undetected for long periods of time."

"He was in surgery for hours that day," Cat said. "They even sent for that specialist from the university hospital! And everybody missed it?"

"The location and size of the wound made it extremely difficult to detect," another male voice said. "We discovered and repaired the damage we saw, and examined him thoroughly to make sure we hadn't missed anything. But it was like a papercut. And with all the debris..."

"The 'Shit happens' defense in' gonna fly with us," Mike said. "You know that, right?"

And then Aisha said, "All I wanna know is is 'e gon' wake back up this time? Cause what I'm seein'..."

Her voice sort of broke.

And the first guy said, "It will be a difficult recovery, as I've said. But he's a very courageous young man. He's not going to give up without a fight."

"Don't look like he fightin' all that hard right now," she said.

She was right. I didn't have a lot of fight left. Body and soul had just about quit on me. In fact, I found out later that Hugh flew some big deal doctor over here from Germany to see what he could do. And when the big doc told him what he thought my chances were, he called Nick and my lawyers to talk about what all they would need to do when I died. Not "if," but "when." The diagnosis was that grim.

I don't know what happened for a few days after that last surgery, though. Alls I did was drift in and out of the fog. I knew some voices, and I knew who was touching me, usually. The girls, anyway. All the random nurses, not so much.

It's funny how you can actually feel love. And when there isn't any. The nurses were sweet, but their hands didn't say the same things that the girls' hands said to me. The nurses were working. The girls were working with me, through their hands. Asking my body what was up. Where they were needed. How to help me heal.

And begging me to stay. Always, beneath every touch, they were saying, "Don't leave me." I felt it. And fought for them. Even when I wasn't sure I had an ounce of energy left, I fought for them. Because their hands begged me to.

They tell me I laid on my side almost in fetal position for days, breathing really fast, trying to stay cool like puppies do. Even after they'd brought my temperature down, I felt like a volcano, you know? Like there was something deep down in my gut still threatening to send that temperature back up any second.