Gifted Ones

Chapter 13 Amber

The first day in the hospital is spent counting ceiling tiles. I try to block out the heart monitor, but it always penetrates my thoughts and pounds into my groggy head. I find that I am counting the twenty tiles to the beat of the machine. BEEP, one, BEEP, two, BEEP, three, BEEP. I've heard about a form of torture where they put a prisoner all alone in a room with a repetitive noise that never ends. It drives them crazy, listening to the eternal beat they can do nothing to stop. I always wondered how people are affected so much by it. I guess now I understand.

The second day a man comes in and tells me that I'm due for skin graph surgery in the next day. I contemplate this.
Reconstructive surgery. The only surgery I've ever had was getting my tonsils removed when I was seven. And this is for a serious injury I sustained, not just for getting sick once or twice. I just eat the hospital food and pray I don't die on the table.

Sometimes I'll just let myself go and cry into the thin hospital pillow, letting the homesickness wash over me. I want to go home. I didn't expect to feel this way. I spend most of my time at home studying or avoiding my parents and their arguing. But I miss them. I miss them horribly. My siblings too. I miss helping Alex with homework. I miss babysitting Andrew and Andy. I miss helping Alan through newfound difficulties in middle school. They say that you can never love something as much as you miss it when it's gone. And I do miss them. All of them. Because, although I studied for my parents, I always resented them in the recesses of my own mind. And I truly regret that now.

After that I lose track of time. There is no window in my hospital room, which is honestly more like a cell than anything. I spend hours simply staring at the ceiling, my mind wandering off to the far corners of the earth and back. Soon I can no longer tell the difference between my sleep state and my waking one. I drift in and out of awareness like a boat floating over wave after wave. I feel so alone, as the only people I see are the strangely silent nurses that serve my food and escort me carefully to the bathroom connected to the room. Time passes in the world all around, but it leaves me ever behind.

The door opens sometime later to the form of a tall dark-skinned man in medical scrubs. I've never seen him before. I assume that he's just a regular nurse until he comes over to the bed and actually speaks to me. "Good afternoon, Miss Fredrickson," he says. "I am here to move you."

"Move me?" I ask. "Where?"

"To your surgery prep of course!"

My stomach drops. Oh crap. That's today? I'm actually getting surgery. Like, under anesthetics surgery. Oh no no no no I can't. Crap!

The man moves around to my morphine drip and starts messing with switches and knobs. "Wait, sir, I-"

"No buts about it Miss. So sorry."

Suddenly I feel tired, so tired. The world starts to shrink to a single point above my head and my eyelids droop closed. So tired. The last thing I hear it the sound of wheels rolling against the floor and feel like I'm moving forward quickly.

Hello! Yeah. . . . . . This is a dumb update, but I can't write four Haven pov chapters in a row, so. . . . Yup! More stuff happens to Haven in one day than Amber. Like, three days staring at the ceiling bad. Uh huh. Aaaaaanyway, so sorry about this!

-iambibliophilic