Ain't No Mountain High Enough

"Stayin' Alive"

Valerie ended up coming the next morning, but I didn't feel like visitors. I felt bad for having the nurse turn her away, but I just couldn't let her see me the way I was. I obviously hadn't gotten a good shower in three weeks, I had tubes up my nose, and I was in so much pain from bruised ribs it was making me overwhelmingly nauseas. As much as I liked Valerie, I just couldn't let her in when I was like this.

So I ended up sleeping the day away. You'd think after three weeks of being asleep I would have had my fill, right? There was really nothing else better to do than sleep, though. Plus, I was feeling drowsy.

In between my restless bouts of sleep, I laid there and stared at the ceiling and tried to figure out what was going to happen next. I was now pretty far behind in school, and the only thing I could do at this point was to drop out of my classes. That meant while my friends were graduating, I would be forced to stay behind. Ugh, as if the nausea wasn't bad enough.

An even more pressing matter was the fact that there was no way we'd have enough money to pay the hospital bills. I'd have to quit my job in grocery store retail. And now we didn't have a car, either.

When it rains, it pours, said my brain.

"Yeah, rain is what got me into this mess anyway," I replied.

Yep, it was only the second day of me being in the hospital, awake, and I was already beginning to talk to myself. I felt pretty much like an idiot. Not only for talking to myself, but for getting in an accident in the first place.

In the days following, I grew more and more frustrated with being stuck in the hospital. My tubes were gone a week after I woke up, which was nice. It was probably the only nice moment. Because after that, they brought me my new wheelchair and the nurses helped me sit in it. For some reason the gravity of how my life was about to change never truly sunk in until that moment.

Let me just lay it out for you clearly. Imagine this: you can't feel your legs at all. You can't move them at all. Now think about everything you do with your legs. You walk with them, you balance yourself with them. When you sit down, you need them in order to get back up again. Basically, I couldn't even get out of bed without them.

To make things more awkward, I'm six feet tall, and the nurses were probably pushing five feet. One of them might have been five foot four. Anyways, they had to send in another nurse, a man about my size, to help them get me into the wheelchair. By the time I was sitting in it, my face was all hot and red from embarrassment, frustration, and exertion. At first, the nurses had been giggling and trying to lighten the mood, but now they knew that I was not going to have that.

"You'll get used to steering yourself," one of them said. "One of us can take you around the halls if you want."

I shook my head. I was still trying to process just how different this would be. I wouldn't be able to do pretty much anything by myself. At least, that's what I thought then. Things have obviously gotten better now, but that day? It was one of my lowest points.

I touched the large wheels and imagined myself pushing them whenever I needed to get somewhere. Maybe I would get buff from having to wheel myself around everywhere. Heck, I didn't know. I was desperately trying to grasp at any silver lining to all of this.

Eventually, I asked to get back in bed, so they helped me out of the wheelchair, and it was another embarrassing few minutes before I was laying in the place I had come to hate the most. When the nurses left, I cried for the first time since my dad's funeral. Have you ever been so angry and exhausted you just sit there and cry? It makes you feel like an idiot, and that only makes things worse. Pretty soon, the only thing you can do is sit there blubbering like a little kid.

I'm going to change gears here, because things went pretty much like clockwork for the rest of the time. I learned how to get around in the wheelchair, and was wheeling around the halls like I was in a little go-cart. I got to take showers, but not without something helping me in and out of the shower, which was humiliating. I felt like a toddler, and I think that was the most embarrassing thing of all.

All in all, I stayed at the hospital for a total of a month and a half. I was surprised when Keto came and picked me up in a brand new (used) sedan that looked a lot like Leon had. He was even the same deep green color. This time Veronica had named him; George. Why the heck she named the thing George, I'll never know.

The drive home made me realize another change in my life. For some reason it had never hit me that I would actually be nervous to be in a car. Every time I thought a car would run into us, I flinched.

"Dude, we're fine," Keto said when he noticed. He had always been a careful driver, but I had the urge to grab the wheel and do it myself. Yeah, yeah, I had been the one to get myself into a crash the last time, but for some reason not being in control of the situation made me want to panic even more.

When we got back to the apartment, I had never been so glad that ours was on the first floor. Keto helped me get into the wheelchair, which was getting easier to get in and out of, and wheeled me up to the door. If I hadn't been so tired, I would have done it myself. Just this once, I let him treat me like I couldn't do anything for myself. I was just glad to be home.

From there, things really started escalating.

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Check out the Bee Gees song, "Stayin' Alive"!

Peace ✌ ~ A.J.