The Road to Eliza

Road to Recovery

That's when the two ambulances finally pulled up and four men and women ran over to us. The point that I could actually hear the blood splatter when they stepped near us made me almost puke. "Hey Ron, we're gonna need two gurneys, it's pretty bad." They set us up on top of the gurneys and as they started to lift mine up I felt each step pound into my bullet wound in my back. By the third step I couldn't get my breath back, my ribs felt like they were ripping my body open from the inside out. The medic looked down and then said, astonished, "Carry! This girls got a back wound too!" They began to run faster to the van and then everything went black. I woke up to sirens screaming and a few doctors scurrying around my body. "Honey, you need to stay still. This is very serious and we can't let anything happen to you. Okay?" I did the usual and nodded while trying to ignore the groping pain in my back and shin. Not only had I been shot twice, but my anxiety was over the top and I almost started to flip out again. Before I could let this get to me, I thought about what Nate had said. Keep my heart beat down. Was he okay? Did he end up passing out? My mind was in a fog and I began to lose my memories again. Why were we shot again? I felt like this question would never be answered. When we pulled up to the hospital they very slowly moved me out, making sure not to even bump my pinky finger. "Hun, you cannot move one bit because a back wound is very serious. There's a possibility of you being paralyzed and we cannot let that happen. Please just stay with us and trust us to do our job, okay?" This time I said, "okay." As they were rolling me past the rooms I saw Nate lying on a bed, fully awake still gripping his knee. "Son, if you want us to help you, you have to let go of your knee." "But I..." We were moving too fast for me to hear the rest of that conversation. Nate had always been the stubborn type, he knew what he needed but refused to let people help him. I think it was more of a tough guy kind of act, he had been teased when we were young because he hung out with a girl (me) instead of the big group of guys in our grade and was kind of small. Since he was about sixteen, Nate had gotten into weight lifting. He was pretty bulky, and, honestly, it suited him very well. All of these thoughts ran through my head in the thirty seconds that it took for them to move me down the hall. They lifted me onto a bed within no time and plunged an IV into my arm which began to relieve the pain in a matter of minutes. My mind started to slip in and out and suddenly I was back to that deep sleep I was in before, but this time, painless.