The Dreams

Chapter Fifteen

The doctors could offer no explanation for her sudden rise back into consciousness. They tried to explain it away by saying she suffered some sort of trauma their imaging machines could not detect, but her body had managed to repair the damage on its own due to her youth. They did some more imaging and then required her to do a sleep study before releasing her back to her mother's care.

Being at home with Mother rather than back at college was less than ideal in Rina's opinion. She conceded that she was not in any sort of shape to go back to school just yet, so she knew the only place she could go was home. At the moment she still felt reasonably optimistic that she could get back to her classes without having to take incompletes for this semester. Doing so would mess up her plans beyond recognition and she hated the idea of returning next semester with so many extra classes to worrying about completing in addition to a regular course load.

Allowances had already been made for her at the college because of her sudden illness. Her mother was pushing to have her be permitted to retake some tests as she should have already been out sick at the time she had taken them. She knew this would never happen, and she had a feeling she would end up making up those grade by doing even better on her other exams.

For now she needed to learn to deal with her mother trying to do entirely too much for her. The hospital released her with the advise to take it easy for a while and to slowly ease back into a normal routine as her body had been through a lot recently, but her mother took that to mean that she was a complete invalid who should stay in bed and be fed a diet of soup, jello and ginger ale. Her mother also instituted a bed time for her and checked on her all too often until she fell asleep, and probably after she fell asleep as well. Then she woke her up at exactly seven o'clock the next morning.

Mother refused to comprehend that she had trouble falling asleep at night because of anxiety over possibly not waking up properly again and her lack of activity during the day. She needed to do something during the day before she could sleep at night. She also wished she could wake up at some time other than seven in the morning since she was not allowed to get up and do anything anyway. There was nothing on television worth watching at that hour — morning talk shows were hardly riveting entertainment — and Mother tried her hardest to keep her from reading too much out of some misguided concern over reading leading to studying and studying leading to overexertion.

By the second day of this treatment she had already managed to get a few books tucked away in strategic locations around her bed where she could easily shove hide them again in case of a surprise drop in from her mother.

She did not know how she could endure the rest of the week like this. Mother took a full week of family medical leave to take care of her until she could be trusted to get back on her feet again. She still had days and days of her mother being around constantly before she returned to work. Already she found herself counting down the days until she would be able to roam about the house as she pleased without being constantly coddled or scolded for pushing herself too far.

It was not as though she thought she could just go back to everything being fine and normal from the get-go, but she was old enough to be able to find her own limits. If she went a bit too far that was when she needed her mother to be there, but she needed to test her limits and push herself a bit or she knew she would never be able to make a timely recovery.

She was biding her time. Today her mother had to go to the grocery store. Rina suspected that the household supply of jello and soup had been depleted. She just hoped she would be allowed to graduate back to normal food soon.

With her mother out of the house she got out of bed and walked around a bit without supervision. She waited a full two minutes after she heard the car pull away before she headed for the stairs. Since arriving home her movement had been restricted to the second floor. The stairs barely hardly caused her any trouble at all. Her muscles were not so badly atrophied as to stop her from being able to move under the power of her own body without outside assistance.