Becoming the Storm
34 Coping
“YOU NEED to get out of bed today, young man,” Nurse Ratched said. That wasn’t her real name. Her little badge said, ‘Lois Durham.’ But she’d just taken my book out of my hands and told me sternly that if I didn’t move today, she was going to take out my catheter and let me pee in the bed.
“Why am I even still here? They said I’d been in the hospital for four weeks now. Others were wounded as badly as me. I should be up and out of here,” I moaned.
“Exactly,” Nurse Durham said. “In order to do that, we need to get your feet under you and at least get you to the bathroom. I’m going to bring you up a little bit at a time. You’ll feel a lot of uncomfortable stretching in your back and stomach.”
Yeah. Stretching. This must be what it was like to be drawn and quartered. I suffered through it. She helped swing my legs over the edge of the bed. Shit! That hurt! My left arm was hooked to the IV stand. She put my right arm over her shoulder and lifted as I stood. Pain shot through my hip and side and my leg crumpled under me. She hung on and didn’t let me fall. Damn, she’s strong.
“I don’t get it! Why am I so damned weak? It’s like my leg wasn’t even there.”
“You haven’t been listening to the doctors. Which I understand given the level of pain killers they have you on. But you’ve also had your nose buried in a book and aren’t paying attention. Let’s catalog them.” She started walking me away from the bed a couple steps and then turning to walk back as she recited my injuries. “Multiple perforations in your intestines and colon. Six. Damage to the psoas, rectus abdominus, abdominus oblique, and tendon of the latissimus dorsi. Add a cracked pelvis with a bullet-sized chunk broken out of it. You have a tube inserted in your bladder by way of your penis. You are wearing a diaper so we can clean up any discharge from your anus, which is minimal since you were fed intravenously for three weeks and have yet to eat solid food. And before you start dreaming of steak and potatoes, let me remind you that whatever you put in your mouth is going to pass through your intestines and colon, which have been largely unused for the past four weeks. You need to make it to the bathroom on your own.”
“Cracked pelvis?” My mind stuck there. ‘Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.’
“The first time you were hit, the bullet took a piece off the front edge of your pelvis. The impact cracked that side all the way to your hip joint,” my nurse said. “You stepped between the shooter and his target. If you hadn’t been there, the shot would likely have severed that young woman’s spine instead of lodging in her gluteus maximus. You might hate me for all I’m going to force you to do in the next few days, but I am not going to let that kind of heroism be punished. Now walk.”
I was filled with rage. Not at Nurse Ratched or her stupid insistence that I was a hero. But rage that some anonymous fucker could just gun people down and ruin the lives he didn’t succeed in ending.
“How can someone do that to people? I’ll kill him!” I cried. “How can he just step out of a car and start shooting innocent women? What did they ever do to him?” I threw my right leg forward, locked it in place and put my weight on it. I screamed. Nurse Ratched screamed back at me.
“Nothing! They didn’t deserve it. He was a murderer. Evil. He was not human!” The nurse held me upright as the pain subsided. “Again.” I put my weight on the injured leg and swore vengeance. That was the secret. He wasn’t human. That’s why he needs to be put down, like a rabid dog. Never let a dog bite twice. Put it down. He wasn’t really a human being. Even the term animal was too good for him.
“It’s called ‘survivor’s guilt.’ That won’t do you a bit of good except to give you a name for it and let you know that you aren’t the only one who suffers from it,” the psychologist said. I’d been up all night again until just before dawn when something whispered in my mind to sleep. At least I wasn’t screaming when my eyes came open. Not out loud. When Mom and Anna visited Friday morning, the doctor said I needed to see a shrink. I was surprised when he showed up Friday afternoon. Dr. McCall had referred him.
“The problem is that you will always have it. You’ll always believe that it should have been you who was killed and not those innocent girls. It will always seem like death would have been so much easier than living with this guilt,” he said.
“Fuck. Thanks a lot.”
“You aren’t the only one who suffers from it. Every single person who was at the sorority that day is seeing a therapist.”
“Why? It wasn’t their fault,” I said.
“Exactly.” He just let that hang there. I was waiting for him to continue. It wasn’t their fault. Exactly.
“But I could have done something. I should never have left my date’s side. I could have protected her.”
“Let’s imagine that’s true for a moment. You stay beside your date and don’t shout the warning to your… is Addison your cousin?”
“Sister-in-law.”
“So, instead of trying to save your sister-in-law, you stay by your date. Your sister-in-law dies but Miss Cortales does not. Maybe. You wouldn’t know. You would be dead from the first shot, leaving a clear shot at your date. No one would be there to protect Miss Price. With no threat to his person, the shooter would have had leisure to pick more targets. Maybe even reload. How many do you think would have died then?”
“But it’s so unfair!”
“That’s right. It is. It’s fucking unfair!” he leveled at me. I’d never had a therapist talk to me like that. Certainly not Dr. McCall. “I’m going to ask you point blank. I want you to think carefully about your answer, because it is going to tell me a lot about what kind of person you really are. Would you have traded all those other lives to be free of your guilt for surviving?”
Jesus Fucking Christ! How could he even ask a question like that? Get a grip, Frost.
“No!”
“Then let’s work on putting some tools in your kit to cope with it,” he answered. Some tools? I need a whole new kit. There’s nothing left in mine.
We talked all afternoon. I don’t know how much he was charging, but I figured I’d end up just signing my bank accounts over to him, eventually. He didn’t let up on me, even when I thought the issue of survivor’s guilt was covered.
“Now, let’s talk about why you aren’t sleeping and why you won’t let your friends visit you.” Crap!
“Nightmares,” I whispered. He nodded his head. “Every time I close my eyes, I’m back there. Only it isn’t just the ones who were with me. It’s everyone in my family. He’s killing them all. I can’t stop him. Every night it’s the same thing. If I don’t sleep, I can’t dream.” He sighed. Come on. Give me an easy answer. Tell me I’ll just have to learn to live with nightmares.
“That’s a tough one, Brian. I can spout all kinds of psychobabble to you, but it really comes down to you working through the issues. I’m sorry to say it’s going to take a while. I think, though, that holding yourself away from your family might be making it worse instead of better. Is that why you won’t let them visit?” he asked. I shook my head. He waited.
“It’s not safe,” I whispered. “I’m overwhelmed by the rage. I wake up ready to kill. I can’t differentiate between what is real and what isn’t. I’m afraid I’ll hurt them.” I was exhausted. We’d been talking for at least three hours. My throat hurt again from crying and talking. But I knew it was more. Something I couldn’t tell him. Something I’d never admit aloud. My family couldn’t be around me. I was a murderer.
When I get out of the hospital I’m going to hunt the bastard down and kill him.
Comments
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
