The Flaw in your Heart

59. Emotional Rollercoaster

Chapter 59

Tessa's POV

Those first few days after Dan woke up were a complete blur. So much happened. I experienced about a million different emotions: happiness, sadness, worry, relief... honestly I can't name them all. Once the news had been posted on social media, Dan's phone seemed to explode with messages and notifications from fans, friends, family - it was stressful messaging back as many as I could!

It wasn't like it is in the movies, where they immediately sit up, questioning how they got there, and then they see their loved ones and everything's better and they go home after about a day. Nope. In reality it isn't like that at all.

Following Dan's awakening his condition dropped from severely low to very high, almost to a point where I believed he really could go home in a day. He was in and out of tests and scans and it wasn't until a good few days later we discovered he'd suffered minor brain damage affecting the right side of his body. His speech had also been affected, and the doctors explained to me that it was as if he'd had a stroke - if it helped me to understand what it was like. It was going to take time but they reckoned Dan would probably be able to gain full control of his right side again, which was a relief to hear.

Dan had managed to tell us that he'd heard almost everything that had happened around him which just made me cry so much. I was so, so happy he'd been able to hear what I'd told him. He'd explained as well as he could that he was just constantly slipping in and out of blackness, as if he just kept waking up and going back to sleep; even though he was completely unconscious the whole time. It was incredibly weird. What I was most relieved at was the fact during the whole ordeal he wasn't at all in pain or experienced any feeling of the horrible tubes and wires attached to him. It would have broken my heart if he'd been in such awful silent pain.

"Hey Dan", I said, as I came into his room after being picked up from school.

"H-h-ello", he stuttered, trying hard to speak properly. He smiled his new lop-sided smile at me, his eyes sunken and tired as he sat propped up in the hospital bed. He was stick-thin. The amount of weight he'd lost was terrifying, especially since he'd had practically none to lose in the first place.

"How're you feeling?" I asked as I dumped my bag down and sat down in the seat beside the bed.

He shrugged his left shoulder, "N-not too b-b-bad"

"Great", I grinned encouragingly. "One step at a time"

He nodded in agreement, and I tried hard not to see the disheartened glint in his eyes.

It was so hard seeing him like this, but things could only get better I guess.