Surgical Intensive Care | Five or Six Days after the Accident

A cold, bright room where I was at the center. Nothing around me, just the ceiling above. I couldn’t move.

Like peering through a mummy’s bandages with eyes not completely opened.

Everything squinty and blurred around the edges.

But I felt like I knew where I was. This place made sense.

People came and went. Who were they?

They spoke in hushed voices, occasionally looking over at me, whoever they were.

Ryan, my daughter Jerrica’s boyfriend, was the first person I recognized. Jerr, who’d just turned eighteen, was here, too. So was my sixteen-year-old daughter, Natalie. Wait—Jerrica? I thought she went to North Carolina on vacation with her friend Taylor. Where was Connor, my son? He was only eleven, but school was still out for the summer, and his youth league baseball had been over for weeks...

My mom was here. She kept talking in my ear.

“Aimee, you’re in the hospital.”

Why was she yelling?

She handed me a notebook and pen. I tried to grasp the pen but couldn’t. If I lowered my eyes, I saw my hand—barely—and it was swollen, almost unrecognizable.

“What happened?” I scrawled.

“You were in a car accident. You’re going to be okay,” Mom shouted, as if doing so would make me understand. As if it would make me “okay.”

Now I remembered. My tooth. The helicopter.

We had been on our way home from dance camp. I was the one who wanted to commute. It would save money for the girls and for me, since Natalie was also on the squad. But she had driven Jerrica’s car.

Thank God she wasn’t with me. Thank God that car didn’t hit her.

Beside me, a small, stuffed lion moved into my line of vision. Jerr held it. On the other side, Nat had an elephant, maybe.

Ryan grinned at me. He cracked a joke, something about chardonnay and an IV. I gave him a slow “thumbs up.” My mom wasn’t smiling. And the girls seemed so far away.

I wanted to talk to them, but I couldn’t. And my eyelids were so heavy.

• • •

How many hours passed? How many days?

A male voice, kind and encouraging, coaxed me awake.

“Aimee, I need you to wake up and breathe.”

I heard him, and I turned my head, trying to see him. Who was he?

“That’s it, Aimee. Breathe,” he urged.

I heard him again, but I couldn’t do what he asked. I couldn’t stay awake.

And then sometime, he was back—the next day? the next hour?—explaining that it was time for me to breathe on my own. The tube going down my throat was coming out.

Wait a second. I hadn’t been breathing on my own? And there’s a tube down my throat? How bad was this?

“I need you to take a deep breath in, Aimee, and then blow out through your mouth,” he explained. “It’s probably going to make you cough. Are you ready?”

I nodded.

I breathed in as much as I could and blew, and he pulled the tube from somewhere deep down my throat. I coughed and then felt a kind of freedom. Breathing on my own again didn’t feel any different, unless I did it too deeply—that hurt. He placed long, skinny tubes into my nostrils and around my ears.

“Oxygen, to help you breathe,” he said.

Something was on my tongue. I could feel it now.

I lifted my hand motioning toward it, and a different voice said, “Don’t talk.”

I kept gesturing.

“Calm down, Aimee. Stop moving. And please don’t try to talk. Calm down.”

They didn’t understand. It was my front tooth. I knew it was.

Finally, a nurse leaned in, and I opened my mouth.

“Oh, well, there’s the tooth you lost,” she said. “That happens.”

Such an offhand, breezy remark about my front tooth, one so vital to my smile. But she didn’t care. It wasn’t important to her.

Why had no one noticed it before now? And how had I not choked on it?

The nurse reached over, picked the tooth off my tongue, and just like that, it was gone. But I couldn’t see what she did with it. I bet she tossed it into the trash can. I bet she even thought, “Welp, she doesn’t need this any longer.”

But it was my tooth, not hers. And she didn’t have the right to do that.

I was pissed.

As soon as she turned her back, I lifted my right arm and stuck up my middle finger. A salute in honor of my front tooth, now gone forever. And I didn’t care who saw.

Immature and meaningless, but it was all I could do. And it was enough.

• • •

Sometime during the middle of the night, when no one had been in my room for a while, I could hear music. Were the nurses playing it at their station to comfort patients?

Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

Ohio State University band music. The Best Damn Band in the Land. I remembered. My college alma mater.

Now “Purple Rain.” It’s Prince.

The melodies echoed from some peripheral place, looping over and over and over before settling in my brain.

A fuzzy nothingness surrounded me. I felt like people I knew were outside my room wanting to talk to me, staring at me as if I were on display. I didn’t see them, but I thought I heard their voices.

The music eventually faded away to nothing. Time faded away to nothing, too.

Silence.

A nurse visited and told me they hoped to move me out of the ICU soon.

I was in intensive care?

A dog barked outside of my room. A man spoke, probably a fireman or an EMT. I pushed the buzzer. I wanted to pet that dog, feel its warmth.

“Can the dog visit me?” I asked.

There was no dog. There never had been, the nurse said.

“What happened to the music?” I asked.

There was no music; there never had been.

“You’re hallucinating, a side effect of the drug changes in your system,” the nurse explained.

They were weaning me off heavy sedation to painkillers so I could be moved. A good thing, I thought—my body was doing what the doctors hoped—but it also meant being relocated and transferred to another bed.

The new place was much different than before, more cozy: dim lighting, warmth, and a curtain dividing the room.

Several nurses came into the room. Maybe four, maybe five. They gathered round, grasping edges of the sheets or blankets to move my deadweight body. Grunting, struggling, and maneuvering, they lifted me into a new trauma bed. I was attached to so many sensors that even the slightest movement set off a chain reaction of onomatopoeia.

Beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep.

My new roommate, hidden behind that thin patterned material, was not happy with this. I heard great sighs of disgust from her corner.

I faded in and out of a sleep filled with scattered, strange moments and vivid, broken dreams.

The computer in my room turned on, revealing a program that projected over an entire wall. By simply blinking my eyes twice (much like double-clicking a mouse), I could choose a virtual escape that would separate my mind from my body’s trauma. And like the rides at Disney World that sweep you over beaches, cliffs, or rainforests, I sailed through spectacular oceanfront landscapes for a time, comfortable and free, until a notice popped up that in order to continue, I would have to provide my credit card information or be billed.

I worried that the trip my brain had taken was adding another cost to what had to be an already huge medical bill. I also wondered what kind of place I was in. What kind of hospital offered virtual brain escapes?

Later, God came to me in the form of a woman. Ethereal and fairy-like, she was dark-haired and wearing a long, gauzy white dress. She comforted me and then became Clifford the Big Red Dog. Clifford comforted me, too.

The voices of various family members mingled in conversation just outside my room, and I overheard a surprise being organized in the hopes that I was being moved home soon. Home? Did they even know what was wrong with me yet? I was worried, anxious, even in such a dreamlike state. How could I go home when I couldn’t even move my body?

I dreamt of my family leaving secret gifts all over the room for me to take home, much like when Santa visits sleeping children on Christmas Eve. Two new overstuffed armchairs took the place of the hospital’s dismal plastic ones. A shiny, new white fridge sat against the wall. Fluffy, pastel-colored towels were stacked on a table where a beautiful floral arrangement had been placed. There was even a nice set of toiletries left for me at the foot of my bed.

I heard voices of family fighting with nurses about removing the gifts, which nurses said weren’t fair to the other patients. Then I overheard plans for a parade at the hospital in my honor—since there could be no gifts. In my sleepy, dreamlike haze I thought about waking up to my very own parade, and I couldn’t wait.

But I woke up to stark emptiness.

Had I imagined everything? Where was everyone? Why hadn’t they come in to see me?

I heard familiar voices outside the room again. My brother Brian’s wife, Laurie. Mom. Did I hear Connor, too? When would they come in? I thought it had been a week since the accident, and Connor hadn’t come to visit yet. I missed my baby boy.

Just then, my bed began to shake. Someone was underneath it.

“Connor? Is that you? Stop that! Quit hiding and come here. Come see me.”

Connor was playing tricks on me, but I was drowsy and didn’t have the energy for games.

I continued to float in and out of sleep.