My brothers keeper- For him I'd risk it all.

Chapter Nineteen- Kissed

"Ma, can you call Doctor Martin?" Bryan asked.

Doctor Martin came walking in.

Bryan was relieved to see him, "can you take this tube out, it's annoying me." He snickered. The tube ran from his nose as he tugged at it.

"Yes, no problem, do you feel like you can eat on your own?" Doctor Martin said as he slowly removed it.

Bryan nodded.

"That's great, it seems like your lung capacity has increased."

Bryan sat up and squinted his eyes, the pain of the wound was still unbearable.

"Looks like you will still need some pain killers, but probably not as strong." He wrote down in his file.

The nurses came in and took the catheter out and they put him in a wheelchair and pushed him to the showers.

Bryan felt his legs they were weak he hated that. His hair had grown, and his beard was thicker. He asked the nurse for some scissors and started to shape his beard. He looked up at the nurse who was an elderly Caucasian woman with red hair staring at him naked in the shower. She looked away to give him some privacy. He wheeled himself out of the shower and placed a towel over himself. "Do you think I can I walk?" He asked.

She made a face, "I don't see why not." She passed him his robe and helped him put it on. She wheeled him out of the bathroom and showed him the rails at the side of the hallway.

He tried to get up from the chair, but he couldn't. He used his muscular arms to push himself, but his legs wouldn't work. He felt strange for a second, then he thought about his career in football, tears filled his eye, he tried to hold his tears back in front of the nurse.

"Hey," the nurse said, "one step at a time okay. You were shot and you've been in bed for almost a month, you can't expect to just get up and walk out of here." She put her arm around him. "I'll put a request for a physiotherapist to start rehab with you tomorrow, alright?"

He nodded his head. "Thank you." He said wiping his eyes. He looked down and stared at his chest wound which had a plastic dressing over the top of bandages.

The nurse pushed him back to his room, two male nurses came in to help him back in the bed.

He became angry reaching for his phone on the side table. There was dried blood all over it and the battery had died. "Ma, where's my charger?"

She looked around for it in her bag and plugged it into the wall. Bryan hated himself so much right now, he became so angry that he couldn't remember everything about the shooting. He hated that his legs didn't work.

Doctor Martin walked in and sat down at the side of the bed. "What's going on?" He asked Bryan. He remembered how his son used to be when he would get mad at himself for not being the best, even though he was good at everything. He was hard on himself and he saw the same thing in Bryan.

"I don't know he put his head in his hands, one minute I'm good and the next minute I can't even fucking walk, and I don't even know if I'm gonna be able to play ever again."

Doctor Martin looked at him, "you're lucky you're even alive Bryan." Doctor Martin looked out the window, "do you know you survived a gunshot wound to your chest? I see kids your age and younger come in here and never walk out again."

Bryan sighed, "Yea I know, but I'm just pissed, I don't know." He said looking down at his bandages. He respected Doctor Martin who had been by his side every day since he came through the ER. Doctor Martin even came in on his days off to check on Bryan. He did more for him in a month than Bryan's father ever did.