The Heart Of The Lonely

CHAPTER 6

Brandon sat in the middle of a fairly dark room, a midnight blue neck brace around his neck. Long tables encircled him where was assembled a dozen of doctors and researchers, all chatting with one another.

He remained silent, eyes staring off into space while his hands gripped his wheelchair. He had managed to zone out of the conversations as well as the noises surrounding him and now waited patiently for the session to end so that he could be escorted back to his room.

It had been two weeks now since he'd woken up and he'd gotten more visits from doctors and specialists than he'd ever had in his lifetime.

With each passing minute, his tiredness of the situation joined up in a constellation of frustration and despair. He knew that it was unfortunately only the commencement of a long series of tests and appointments and although he had no way of escaping them, he was — to say the least —, not looking forward to any of them.

He very much felt like a zoo animal that people came to observe, took pictures of and looked at with both fear and fascination. Like them, he had been taken from his family and carried a weighing sadness for being far away from home.

"You see, the scanner confirms the apparition of the neuronal connection." A woman facing him stated matter-of-factly to her colleagues beside her, finger pointing to an x-ray in front of them on the desk.

They had detached it from the white light board behind them. There, were hung at least twenty photographies of different parts of his bodies.

Only he knew better, he'd have thought that some of them belonged to another patient. And maybe there were, as a way to compare his progress to the average John Doe. Regardless, he hadn't had this many taken of him before and wasn't sure what he was supposed to feel when they had shown them to him.

For one, he didn't really know how to decipher them and all the medical jargon was further from being his area of expertise. How could he deal with the informations he was being given, when the only thing that mattered to him was getting out of here? Leaving this place would mean he could finally put this nightmare right where it belonged: in the past.

"Indeed, they compensated for the liaisons caused by the bullet."

It was the turn of a man to speak, who seemed to be in his late fifties. He leaned forward, gesturing to an area with his pen.

"It's happened before." He pursued.

On his right, two more professionals were having another discussion. They were all extremely focused, like they were trying to resolve a puzzle.

"20 years of coma, several wounds and a cardiac arrest." Brandon heard someone say.

"Do you have any memories? Flashes? or even sounds?" Someone asked him and very progressively, he lifted his head, looking up.

The chatter grew louder and it didn't take long for him to feel overwhelmed, his heart racing and his head feeling as though it was going to explode. The environment, the state of mind in which he was in stressed him to no end and even though the white-coat wearing people in the room were only doing their jobs, wanting to find explanations and trying to make sense of the results they had gotten, he wasn't certain if they realized what it was like for him.

Without being conscious of it, they were putting a certain pressure on him, asking too many questions he didn't really have the time to properly consider.

Shaking his head the best he could, he didn't answer them. All the lights that had been scattered around the room for the purpose of reading the x-rays were beginning to make him nauseous.