It took Mum, Jay and I less than ten minutes to drive from the school grounds uptown to the hospital; five more to reach the floor where Angel’s room was.
These few minutes was all it took for me to get over my own narrow escape from death with Chris, for the time being – I guess I was in shock, unable to fully comprehend what had happened, and still so worried about Angel, who must have been through similar ordeals almost daily before the last attack.
The hallway was buzzing with doctors and nurses when we finally reached Angel’s room, people in scrubs and lab coats running in and out of the room without doing anything much at all.
Mum was the first in there, pushing the other nurses aside with one hand while she checked all the stats and records on the various clipboards being passed around.
Jay and I just stood back, watching helplessly as alarms flashed and pagers beeped, and Angel lay, motionless excepting an occasional twitch, in the middle of the chaos.
“Everyone back!” A man suddenly called from the midst of the swarming nurses; obviously a high-ranking official from the way that everyone obeyed the order and slowly filtered out the door to leave Jay and I, and Mum and this new doctor standing around the bed as Angel’s eyes started moving around fitfully, her eyelids still shut tightly.
“Angela, Angel, can you hear me?” The doctor asked quietly, firmly, shining a light in her eyes to check for a reaction. “If you can hear me, I want you to try and squeeze my hand, okay?”
As many times as I had heard that line on corny TV shows, I was amazed at the spark of hope that flared inside me when Angel’s pale hand, masked by the needle of the IV drip, held weakly onto the doctor’s larger one.
“Very good,” he continued in soothing tones, ignoring the movements behind him as we shuffled around in nervous excitement and worry. “Now, I need you try really hard, and open your eyes for me, can you do that?”
A silent minute passed, waiting breathlessly for any sign of movement from Angel – then finally, her eyelashes fluttered, and she frowned, obviously using all of her remaining strength to try and wake up.
“…Jay?” was the first word she uttered, her eyes still unfocussed and only half-open as she fought her way back to consciousness.
For a second I thought it was odd that she asked for him, but then I remembered that he was the last person she spoke to, and returned to the sheer relief that she finally seemed okay.
The doctor spoke again then, having finished checking Angel’s stats.
“Your friends are all here, Angel, but before you can talk to them, I need to make sure you’re alright. Can you tell me how many fingers I’m holding up?”
And so he went through the whole melodramatic spiel of checking her mental wellbeing, and requesting more scans – but, amazingly, everything seemed instantaneously back to normal; she was beaten and tired from the week of unconsciousness, but normal.
Thankfully that meant that the doctor let us in to talk to her just hours later, not the days that I had been dreading.
The room was dark, and still smelled of bleach and disinfectant, by the time Jay and I were allowed in; but it wasn’t enough to keep the grin from my face when I saw Angel sitting up in bed, weary but as glad to see us as we were to see her.
“Hey guys,” she said when she saw us, managing a weak smile.
“Hey,” I replied, sitting on the edge of the bed and looking her over. “Y’know, you look like you just slept for a week.” I stated, obvious as it was – just glad to be able to talk to her at all.
