Take My Picture

Chapter twenty four

Harriet's POV

The next few weeks were frustrating to put it lightly. The first few days were kinda a mess from the anaesthesia and other medication so I don't remember much, just that I was in pain. It took them a few days to get my medication right, but even after that, my head still aches pretty much constantly. My throat was still killing me from the intubation so I avoided talking, and well, the longer I didn't talk, the more scared I became that my issues with speaking weren't caused by the intubation.

So for the first week, I stayed in my hospital bed watching terrible daytime television, listening to Madison and Brinley fill me in on all their school gossip when they visited, and I finally got back to editing some photos. I had quite a backlog of photos the companies wanted to be edited, and because I had so much free time I managed to get them all done in a few days.

Demi called a lot too. She's off on the jingle ball tour and doing a whole bunch of stuff. I guess it's a busy time for her. She still called almost every day, well FaceTimed actually. Basically, she would just talk at me which I was grateful for; everyone else has been trying everything to get me to talk.

My doctor says that it could have been caused by the surgery, that because there were complications, there is a chance that something was hit that shouldn't have been. He says that there is a chance that some damage was done meaning that my brain doesn't know how to tell me to talk. I mean he said it in a completely different way but that's what I took from it. I think he talked to Elise about it being psychological. He thinks that I'm scared. Which, I guess I kinda am, so I guess he's partially right.

Elise and Aggie spent the most time with me over that week, but I would just end up getting annoyed at them. They're both worried, and I get that, but they always lead the conversation, as one-sided as it is, back to me not speaking. I couldn't really get up to escape them either, it just made my headache worse when I did. I started getting pretty frustrated with myself because of it. I wanted to talk, I really did. But something was stopping me and I didn't know how to decipher what it was.

Dr Shepherd told me on Friday, exactly a week after I woke up, that I was ready to be discharged. The conditions of discharge were that I would have twice-weekly therapy sessions at the hospital to work on the whole speech thing.

It's Saturday, two weeks after I woke up, and I still haven't said anything. Elise is taking me to my third therapy session. Not that I have anything to compare them to, but these sessions seem abnormal. There's obviously a therapist there, but Dr Shepherd is also there all the time. And they keep giving me weird 'exercises' that are supposed to help me talk again. I think they're just trying to figure out if I have the physical ability to speak, or if it is, in fact, a psychological thing.

I kinda just spend the majority of the sessions staring at the two doctors. I think they're getting frustrated with me. I'm kinda getting frustrated with myself.

My therapist keeps telling me that fear only has a hold over me if I let it, that I need to embrace the fear and do the thing that scares me anyway. I know that I'm scared of not being physically able to speak, so my brains' way of dealing with it seems to be to stop talking anyway. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me but I can't voice that to my therapist. It's kind of just become a really fucking frustrating cycle. But it seems to be one I'm not all that eager to break.

Today my therapist has decided that he's just going to talk at me for an hour and a half, except it seems that today he's decided to be extra harsh about it. For the most part, I just blocked them both out but it got to a point where no matter where I looked, what I tried to think about or how hard I squished my eyes shut, I could still hear him telling me that maybe I'm just being lazy. That maybe I like the attention that not talking gets me.