Love Sick

Treatment

Eva

My foggy vision begins to clear inside of a CT scan machine, causing me to panic as I try and remember why I was inside of one, but the loud over head speaker of a doctor calms me down. A loud ache in my temple pounds profusely as the bright light beats down on my eyelids, sending painful jolts into my brain.

"Take her out." I heard the doctor order, the slow moving tray pulling my lethargic body from the white machine. My thoughts were going a mile a minute as I tried to think of what injury I could have sustained by the butt of that gun.

The gun.

The noises, just another reminder of the horror that I had endured. My body ached for sleep, but the thought of sleeping at all made me want to scream. The dead bodies that littered the floor caused a lump to form in my throat as I tried to block it out, but blocking those images only allowed for the gruesome screams of victims to fill my head.

Footsteps behind me caused me to tense, the urge to fight now filling my bones as I tried to defend myself from whatever was trying to approach me.

"Dr. Zambrano, we're going to take you back to your room so the doctor can debrief you." One of the young nurses said while the other two helped lift me into the rolling bed, my hand now covered in tubes and needles.

"That's bad, he's going to say that something is wrong with me. We always do that with our patients so they don't make a scene in front of people." I recited nervously, my eyes welling up as I tried to remain calm, my heart rate now increasing on the loud chart.

"Wow, you're observant. No, we are just taking you back to your room so you can be more comfortable, and the bright lights are bad for your headache. You're not in a trauma hospital, you can relax." She said with a smile, but with the mention of my work, my blood went cold.

"Celeste!" Another nurse scolded, causing her cheeks to turn bright red and remain silent until she rolled me back up to the empty room, quietly closing the door behind her.

I mindlessly fiddled with my hospital bracelet, my mind going all over the place as I tried to come to terms with the fact that I had been a gunman's target, and that he had every intention to murder me on the spot.

My hands shook with fright as I began to count, my heart hammering inside my chest as the gunshots replayed in my head. The counting used to help back in Cuba, when horrible sounds of violence would scare me as a child, slow and steady counts would bring me back to my calm reality, but this time the voices got louder with every count, nearly causing me to shake in absolute terror.

"Knock knock." A small voice called, slowly opening the heavy wooden door, cutting my violent thoughts off. A tiny blonde woman scurried inside the room, her face blurred from the tears that were falling down my cheeks.

"Eva?" The woman asked, holding her hands out to me, causing my eyes to snap up and stare.

"Serena?" I whimpered, immediately clearing my throat to hide my tears from the young doctor who had looked up to me during her time at Miami One. She had moved to a neighboring hospital where they were installing a new trauma hospital, one that she could lead.

"That's Dr. Warren to you." She smiled, winking before pulling up a seat beside my bed, keeping a safe distance between us. "I'm sorry about what happened, I don't even know what to say to you." She apologized sadly, making my hands tremble a bit faster before my mind flashed to the incident. I swallowed and nodded at her, picking anxiously at my bloodied fingernails that hadn't been cleaned since the attack.