SWIM Book 1 (Complete three-hundred pages)

DAY 13

Friday, December 1, 2017

J

ack told me later that he carried me to the bathroom while the drugs put me to sleep and he stripped me completely naked. I didn't mind that, not one bit. He said washed, inside and out, every bare inch of me. I didn't mind that either, not one bit.

While giving me a shower, he gave himself a shower, and kissed my flesh. He prayed that shower would be the first of many we would have together. He wrapped me in towels, being careful of my wound and the slab of splintery wood staked inside my lower stomach beside my belly button, and carried me, carefully, while he walked on his bare feet through the door to the master bedroom, which he said wreaked of disinfectant. He laid me on a sterile towel across the bare mattress of a twin bed. He knocked on the master bedroom door connected to the living room to signal to the other boys to take their showers and enter the master bedroom now for procedure.

He said the moment everyone was inside the master bedroom. They stripped the blanket off my bare stomach, and Travis Gibbs pulled out the sterile scissors, and everyone grabbed tweezers and other utensils. Jack had never been more afraid in his life.

Eventually, they pulled the wooden bits from my flesh in separate chunks, and George had to run out through the sterile bathroom, to the unsterile living room to the balcony to throw up.

Jack told me Brett's face was red the whole time because he was holding his breath when they finally pulled the last chunk of wood out and could see the open cavity of my abdomen. Less blood milked out of me than they had expected. But Jack said, while the tweezers and last chunk of wood laid in Surgeon Travis's hands, Jack saw Travis's eyes roll all the way into the back of Travis's head, and Travis fell backward onto the floor in a dizzying faint.

Thankfully Travis had already prepped Jack, Brett and Craig on how to sew up my wound quickly once my wound became vulnerable to the open air with needle and thread, and the three of them hopped on my stomach like I was their breakfast bacon. Craig pinched the lips of my wound closed, Brett had already prepared the needle and thread and held the line up horizontally to create a steady stream while Jack stitched the gaping wound in a hooked, looping fashion that was clean as a whistle, and he owed it all to the adrenaline running through his veins, and also owed it to the fact that in that moment of sheer horror, none of them could pay attention to the smell of Travis pissing his pants.

The surgery was a success. "The next few days would be painful," Travis later told me, "and if no boats or helicopters ever arrive to save us, the only thing to worry about-- is fatal infection."

The last time I ever had an infection was in my tonsils. And the dreams I had during my tonsil surgery, were rainbows and daisies compared to the horrible nightmare I had during the surgery. . .