Borderline [On hold for major revision]

Chapter 17: Frustration

Chapter 17

[LG1] 

“Mr. Tucker, please listen to her. She is a very smart woman.” Terra had been trying to get me to get a brain scan for the last five minutes, and now it looked like the hospital nurse decided to join in the fun. They’d already done some sort of preliminary scan thing when I was still out of it, but now they said they needed to run even more tests.

“I’m fine,” I said, exasperated. “I barely even feel it.” That wasn’t true at all, but I really didn’t think I needed an x-ray.

“Cal,” Terra started, jumping in again, “you were unconscious for twenty minutes. That usually means that you’re head’s messed up.”

“Well, you’re always telling me that there’s something wrong up in there. But really, I’m fine.”

The nurse tsked at me, but finally assented. “Alright. But do not come crying to me when your brain starts leaking juice, okay young man?”

“Okay.” I wondered if that could really happen. She looked serious.

The nurse left, leaving me alone with Terra. I had kicked Ryan out several minutes earlier after he’d apologized for the hundredth time. It was really annoying since I’d forgiven him the second time he apologized.

“At least put some ice on it,” she said. She sat down next to me on the hospital bed and handed me an ice pack. “Just hold this on it; you’ll feel better. I know you were lying when you said you don’t feel it.”

Busted. I took the bag of ice. “Thanks.”

“Here, let me help you.” She took my hand holding the ice in hers and gently raised it to my head. When she applied careful pressure, it suddenly felt like someone was driving nails through my skull. “Is this better?” she asked softly.

I grimaced. “Not really. Can you just stop that? Ow!”

She dropped the ice pack on the floor “Fine. If you don’t want my help, I’ll just go wait out in the hallway with your family.” She stood up and tried to march out of the room, but I grabbed her wrist and pulled her back.

“What’d I do this time?” I asked, irritated. “Look, you’re a woman, so I get that you have weird mood swings—you more than most—but this is getting annoying. What’s going on, do you just not like me anymore or something?”

For a moment she didn’t say anything. Took two deep breaths. Then she firmly pried my fingers off her wrist and looked at the floor. “That’s not it. That was never it. Just…forget it.” She walked out of the room and didn’t look back.

After twenty minutes of me waiting on the stupid bed and pondering the antiseptic smell permeating the air, they finally let me go. They handed me a white tube of some sort of medicine and sternly commanded me to apply it to the wounded area twice a day. I agreed to everything they were saying even though I wasn’t listening at all. After being there for over an hour, I was itching to leave. I was sick of the anodyne feel to everything, from the white walls to the thin white mattress of the bed to the ceramic tile flooring.

They designed the hospital to make patients feel more comfortable, but it only made me feel like I was in a mental institute, especially when they hadn’t let me leave for over a half an hour. They said it was because of something about confusion caused by a concussion. I wasn’t confused—I was bored, uncomfortable, irritable and in a lot of pain, but definitely not confused. Not to mention that now that the baseball game was over, there was nothing to distract me from thinking about everything that’d happened earlier and the potential trouble I could be in. By the time they’d determined that I did not, in fact, have any sort of severe brain damage and let me out, I was borderline homicidal.