I'm back with another late update! Bare with me for this chapter, okay? POSSIBLE TW.
Juliana's POV
When I come to, it's not peaceful. It's actually quite painful, and I immediately wish to still be asleep.
If only it wasn't for that stupid, obscene noise.
I groan. Everything hurts, everything feels heavy, and something is tickling my nose. I don't like it. I don't like any of it.
Okay, three seconds, three seconds and then I'm going to get up.' I told myself.
'One.' I ignore the obscene noise that got even more excessive, even more annoying.
'Two.' I ignore the gut feeling that told me I should stay down.
'Three.' I use much more energy than should be necessary to simply sit up, and instantly regret it, seeing as my head swam, and my ears rang incessantly.
I open my eyes, taking in my surroundings.
White.
That's all I see. Looking down I see the tubes sticking out of my arms, and I did the first logical thing I could think of.
I yank them out.
There were about 3 in total. One in my forearm, one in the back of my hand, and then one in my other hand. Reaching up to do something about the feather that was being swished back and forth up the inside of my nose, I was confused when my hand wrapped around something small, bendy, and round, wrapping around my head right underneath my nose, being held in place by hooking behind my ears.
A nasal cannula.
It was blowing a steady stream of air up into my nose, which would explain why my nose was being tickled.
Looking over I assess the vital machine next to me. I noticed the little sticker that was wrapped around my pointer finger, and then the blood pressure cuff wrapped around my bicep. Annoyed, I lucidly reach over and press the correct buttons to turn off the machine, then rip off the cuff and sticker, thankful that the stupid thing had shut up.
I still wasn't thinking very straight as I swung my legs over the side of the bed, duly noting the fact that I looked to be in some sort of pinkish purple scrubs, and stood up, only to fall forward, narrowly avoiding face planting with the ground by catching myself on the little cluttered table to my left.
I officially knocked down a cup of water, and multiple medical looking things, still in their wrappers, but at the moment I couldn't bring myself to care.
'Get out. Get safe. Don't let him find you like this.' was the only thought going through my head right now.
I righted myself, fighting through the cloud of things I didn't have the time to process as I stumbled forward. Without the nasal cannula, it was significantly harder to breath, and there was a large pain and pressure on my chest, as though someone was repeatedly stabbing my chest while Massimo's fat ass sat on top of it.
I had stumbled my way to the door and yanked it open in time to see a startled looking Elijah, hand poised above where the handle was not but a second ago.
He looked at me, floundered, and just as he opened his mouth to say anything, everything went black.
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Undetermined amount of time
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I'm hungry.
That was the first thought that I had when my eyes opened. I then shut them tightly, wincing at how the light hurt my eyes.
I swallow uncomfortably, my mouth horribly dry.
I tried to move, but my arms seemed stuck. I slowly wiggle around, stretching out from one end to the next, trying to wake myself up enough to figure out what the fuck is happening.
Finally I open my eyes, and notice that I'm in a white room. Everything is silent. Very, very eerily silent.
Suddenly the sound of air hissing fills the room, and my bicep begins to be squeezed, hard. I try moving it, but my arm only gets so far. I turn my head to the left to see what on earth is going on and I see a blood pressure cuff strapped to my arm.
Following the little wire that was connected to the machine taking my blood pressure, I saw that the heart rate, blood pressure, and blood oxygen monitors were all turned on.
I lifted my arm to try and turn off the machine, not seeing why I would need it when my arm was jerked to a stop, my wrist being held.
I turn my head to look at what is holding me, having to crunch my stomach to see, and then regret making that decision because my ribs hurt like hell.
I push up into a sitting position, and figure out why my arms felt so stuck. It's because they were tied down.
There was a blue padded cuff strapped around each of my wrists and by the feel of it, ankles, which was then tied to the railing of the hospital bed.
That's when I freaked out.
The heart monitor next to me went ballistic. It; luckily, wasn't one of the ones that audibly beeped, however the lines indicated my heart rate went crazy, reaching high and dropping back down low at very quick speeds.
As my brain calmed down, and clear, conscious thoughts started to push through, I realised that thrashing as I was would not help me.
I stopped, took as deep of a breath as I could, and thought about the situation rationally. I can't do anything if I'm tied down, so I need to handle the restraints first.
The restraint on my left arm had velcro that went through a buckle. Leaning over I contorted my body enough that I could get my teeth down to the velcro. I blinked away the tears that came to my eyes, and the struggle it was to breathe despite the cannula shooting oxygen through up my nose.
It took about three times to get the velcro in between my teeth, and each failed time felt like a new hell sentence with the amount of pain I was in.
Finally, on that fourth try I got just enough in my teeth to be able to yank it partially up. That was all I needed.
I used the next few yanks to get the velcro completely disconnected. I wiggle my wrist, yanking and pulling in different directions to create a large enough area for me to be able to slip my wrist through.
Once my left wrist was through, it was pretty easy to detach my other restraints. Then I went to work on the machines.
I reached over to hit the buttons that would allow me to turn off the machine without alerting, but when I did a little screen popped up asking for a passcode before it would shut down.
'What the hell' I thought, confused.
I decided to just set the stupid thing off. I take off the oxygen, the blood pressure cuff, carefully pull out the iv's so as to not rupture any of my veins, and then take off the heart monitor sticker, which of course, caused the machine to start reloading itself.
I looked around the room, and saw that I had a change of clothes on the table-counter-thingy across the room from me. I try to stand up to go grab those, and head for the door that I had a feeling led to some sort of bathroom.
Key word, try to. The moment I tried to step forward, I got a facefull of floor.
A scream ripped through me before I could stop it, which only set off a chain of events. The pain in my ribs brought tears to my eyes, which I fought back, but then I realised that I couldn't breathe.
It's like the air refused to go in or out of my lungs, no matter how hard I breathed. No matter how much air felt like it should be going in my lungs, it wasn't enough.
It didn't help that I was also coughing like crazy, further disrupting my fight for air.
I heard a door slam open, I heard yelling, and there were hands on me. Someone flips me over, and I am able to make out the face of someone that I don't know.
He looked up, yelled something to someone else in the room, and then turned his attention back to me.
I saw his lips move, I knew he was talking to me, asking me something, but I couldn't understand what.
I was aware of my body shaking in a borderline convulsive way, as my vision slowly started going black, the ringing in my ears getting even louder before I finally succumbed to darkness. It only felt like a few seconds, however it must have been much longer than that seeing as it was now dark outside.
I lucidly looked around, grimacing when I swallowed painfully, feeling like there was sandpaper stuck in my throat.
I shifted, feeling the pressure around my wrists and ankles and immediately knowing that the restraints had been put back on me.
I didn't try to sit up right away, instead, I let myself lay there and observe my surroundings a bit better while I tried to shake off whatever drugs were still lingering in my system.
Looking to my left I once again saw the machine that was reading my vitals, past that, I also saw a door to a bathroom which was slightly ajar. Looking over to the right I saw two guards inside my room, blocking the doorway.
I caught the eye of one and he reached over the nudge the other, who looked up from his phone, saw me, and let out an agitated huff.
He put his phone away, and started towards me. I lift myself up painfully, using the restraints as a sort of rope to help pull myself up.
The guard walked up to the table-counter-thingy adjacent to my bed, and grabbed a cup that I hadn't seen before.
He brought the cup (with a straw) over to me, and wordlessly held it up to my lips.
I immediately started to gulp down water, only for him to pull the cup away from me.
"Slow." He grunted before he allowed me to start drinking again. I drank slowly this time, fully aware that he would probably take the water away again if I didn't.
When the cup was empty, he pulled away and I whispered a thank you, not sure if my voice would put up with anything more.
I shifted enough so that my right wrist was free from the blanket, and looked at the new restraint that had been put on me. This one was brown instead of blue, didn't have nearly as much slack, and was much rougher since it had very minimal padding. This one also didn't have velcro on it either. Turning it a little, I saw that there was a little hole in a barred seam, which I assumed was for a key.
Looking up I see that the guard has returned to his little post beside my door, and I want to ask him what is going on, where am I, why am I here, what happened? But before I can he opens his mouth and says,
"Your family will be here in a few minutes." The guard who first noticed I was awake informed me.
"Where-" I start only to be cut off.
"We have been instructed to not answer any questions at this time." The guard on the left, the one who had given me the water, answered shortly.
We stayed like that for a few minutes. A nurse came in to check my vitals, and she was nice enough to prop my bed up. but when I asked her if she could undo my restraints she looked at me with pity, apologised and explained that only my cousins were allowed to.
I sighed and leaned back, resigned to the awkward silence between me and the stalkerish guards whose gaze I could feel on me 24/7.
"Do you have to stand right there? Can't you at least go outside the room? It's not like I'm gonna go anywhere, not like this." I jerked my arms for example, and the guards gave each other a glance before the one who I assumed to be the one in charge, gave a slight nod and both of them moved soundlessly out of the room.
Before he closed the door, the guard who had given me the water, the one in charge, gave me a look full of warning and said, "Don't you try anything that will get us killed."
With that sombre note, I leaned back, slightly relieved that I at least didn't have eyes on me, at least not that I knew of, and wondered about what shit show awaited me for when my family arrived.
Did they know?
What all did they see?
What even happened?
Did I say anything?
Did I do something?
Did one of them do something to me?
A slew of questions flowed through my mind when suddenly my door was being thrown open.
My head whipped over in surprise, which didn't help my headache one bit, as I saw a long train of people trail into my room. What surprised me though, was the person that had essentially thrown themselves at me.
Elliot had stormed into the room first, and had manoeuvred it so that I was cradled tightly against him. Not enough that I was hurt, but enough that it got the point across.
I wasn't going anywhere.
The rest of the people that had followed pretty hot on Elliot's tail was Uncle Stefano, Massimo, Elijah, Nonna, and finally Grandpa, who made sure to close the door behind him.
"This can't be very comfortable for you." I pointed out to Elliot as I patted his arm in reassurance that I was right here, when nobody had spoke.
"Uh, Juliana?" Elijah asked me from the left side of the bed, looking pointedly at my obviously free right hand while he held up what I assumed to be the key to the restraints.
I simply smiled at him and shrugged, also unaware that I had been able to wriggle my hand from the cuff. It honestly didn't surprise me, seeing as the cuffs were a bit too big, and so they didn't press as tightly to my wrist as they probably should have.
I grab the thin hospital blanket and pull it up higher on me, curling my knees up closer to my chest as I relaxed fully into Elliot's grip. A wave of exhaustion passed over me, and I let out a big yawn, stretching my back upwards which resulted in a nice loud pop.
"Okay Juliana, lets get this over with." Elijah said, rolling himself on the little stool that had been next to the nurse computer that all hospitals had over to my bed after he was done typing on it. "Do you know what happened?"
"Obviously it wasn't something desirable." I said, my brain to mouth filter feeling pretty nonexistent at the moment thanks to whatever pain meds that nurse had slipped into my iv.
"You had," Elijah paused and took a deep breath, "Nine broken ribs."
"Which is almost half, by the way." Massimo unnecessarily added.
"One of them punctured your lungs while you were sleeping. We had to insert a tube inside of your chest, and we sucked the excess air out of your lungs. One slightly concerning thing that came up was the fact that you had blood pooling in your lungs."
"Hold on, what? Blood is not normal, why was there blood in my lungs, is there still blood there? I don't want blood there, get it out!" I freaked out when he said that, fully aware that blood in the lungs was 100% wrong.
"Calm down, it's okay. We did, we got it out when we pumped the air out of your lungs. Right now, we don't know why there was blood in your lungs, there are too many possibilities, and without knowing all of your symptoms, or how long this has been going on, it was like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
"You do seem to have a heart arrhythmia, which is shocking as to how we didn't notice it sooner, but we want to implant a device which will track your heart's rhythm and notify us if something happens. Like if your heart stops, or is dangerously fast/slow.
"We ran a routine blood check and everything came back normal except for a pretty consistent low iron and low blood sugar, which we will keep an eye on both of those. We wanted to wait and run the more invasive tests for when you were awake if possible. Do you feel up to answering some questions? Possibly having a few things checked? I know that coming out of a coma can be pretty overwhelming, but we really need to get this done."
Everyone in the room just stared at me while I tried to process at least half of what was just thrown at me.
And then suddenly I took notice of something.
"HOLD ON." I yelled, my voice ticking slightly, my vocal cords obviously not having been used in a while. "Did you just say coma?" I asked, jerking awake from Elliot and gripping onto Elijah's shoulders.
"Oh, I thought I already mentioned that?" He asked.
"The fuck you did not!" I exclaimed, giving him a look.
"Yes, well we put you into a medically induced coma which for some reason you seemed to be burning off the medicine for extremely fast, which lead to you waking up once during the inducement, and then after we took you off you woke up just long enough to give the entire hospital a heart attack and then now. All in all, you were in a coma for about 4 days."
"I, what is even happening right now?" I asked myself out loud, squeezing my eyes closed, pressing my hands to my forehead like that would make everything make sense.
"Hey, hey it's okay." Elliot rubbed my back, and I felt someone hug me, though I really didn't care who it was at this point. I was overwhelmed, tired as fuck, and severely confused and worried.
"How about we do this in the morning. We could all use some more rest, and I'm sure this is overwhelming." I heard Uncle Stefano say in a hushed voice, followed by murmurs of agreement.
"Two people can stay here tonight, the rest can come back tomorrow." I heard a firm voice, that I'm pretty sure belonged to Grandpa, proclaim.
"I'm staying." Elliot demanded, and no one objected.
"I'm staying as well." I heard Massimo, who was apparently the person hugging me, speak as well.
"No, Massimo you have a-"
"I don't care. I'll fucking cancel it. Family comes first" He said and no one rebutted. Everyone told me good night, and assured me that they would see me again in a couple of hours. It wasn't more than a few minutes after the door closed behind the last person that I was sound asleep.
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Sooooo, if any of you found that last part confusing, don't worry, so did I 😂
I promise it was on purpose, I was trying to make it seem as overwhelming and confusing as possible, because that's also how it would be coming across to Julie.
Sorry I keep updating so late, I'm trying to make longer chapters for you guys, but apparently that's harder than I thought.
I hope ya'll have had a good week!
And let me know if you have any comments or suggestions, I would love to hear them.
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