Vancouver, West End
The surgeon checked Dixie’s pulse and breathing. She injected a powerful local anaesthetic into the leg before administering a second shot of strong opiates. Almost immediately Dixie sailed into the clouds. She closed her eyes and welcomed the weightlessness. Then she opened them again and peered into the harsh light of the emergency beacon. Voices reached her from far away.
“Help,” she tried to say but the word stuck in her throat. Before she could try again, the drugs carried her back to the land of happy and her worries evaporated.
The next thing she knew, Dr. Singh lay beside her, gloved and gowned. “Hi, Dixie. I’m ready now, are you?” The mask muffled her words and made her sound a thousand miles away. Perspiration poured down her face.
“You’re not claustrophobic are you?” Dixie tried to joke.
Dr. Singh shook her head. “Dixie, I’m going to make an incision above your knee, okay? Then I will isolate the muscles before I amputate. After I close the muscles over the stump, they’ll be covered with skin and I’ll dress it. Then we’ll get you out of here and Dr. Harrison will make you much more comfortable. You just need to hang on for the next hour or so okay? It’ll be smooth sailing after that.”
Dixie smiled and nodded at Dr. Singh. The morphine had made her tongue thick and useless. But she was brave, no one could argue that. She’d had two children by natural childbirth. And a few years ago, on the West Coast Trail, she slipped on a mossy ladder and twisted her ankle. She hiked out to the next evacuation spot across miles of rough terrain. By the time she reached Carmanah Point her mild injury had deteriorated to a Grade Three sprain. The agony had been blinding. She had managed it without humiliating herself. She could handle anything.
Her mind wandered. She was on that hike again, watching the whales breach off Owen Point. How many people get to see that? The pain getting home had been totally worth it.
She didn’t feel the first cut of the scalpel. When the muscles were divided and the blood vessels clamped, her resolve weakened. She whimpered. Then the saw ground and bit against her femur. It shrieked ten times worse than any dental drill. The tiny cave trapped the shrill whine and magnified it until it deafened her. The steel sliced through solid bone. Severed nerve endings ignited waves of pain that no drug could stop. The metallic smell of blood filled the air. A crimson haze of terror wrapped around her and her determination shattered. She screamed. She screamed until her voice failed. Then darkness carried her away again.
Glimmers of consciousness came and went. First she was dragged out of the long dark tunnel. Dust rained down on her and people spoke in urgent, disjointed voices. She was on a board, fastened to it in a hundred places, with a block around her head. Someone held her hand. A female voice said, “It’s okay now, Dixie, the worst is over.” A constellation of pain strobed in her vision. A man, who was at least three hundred years old, took her blood pressure while a woman hooked up an IV on her left wrist.
“I’m Dr. Harrison,” the man said, “you’re going to be fine.” He called orders to the nurse in what sounded like a foreign language. Another sedative bloomed in her veins and Dixie slipped back to the warm beach on the Pacific Ocean.
She woke in the back of an SUV and two worried faces watched over her from the front seat. Red rays of sunset flecked the sky as she was carried somewhere. The football stadium? The hot air drooped with humidity. At the end of her gurney the petite doctor wept. Two other women joined her. They talked quietly and then without warning they all laughed. Dr. Singh wiped her cheeks. The blond one with the thick eyebrows lifted the thin blanket and looked at Dixie’s stump. The one with a lab coat over her yoga-wear brushed the hair from Dixie’s mouth. She smelled of coffee.
“Dixie? How are you? I’m Dr. Emily Walter, I’m a surgeon who works with Dr. Singh when she’ll let me. Harminder has done an excellent job on your leg. We’ll have you up and walking in no time.” Her hand felt cool and dry as she stroked Dixie’s forehead.
Tears leaked down Dixie’s face and she stifled her sobs.
Many hours later Dixie woke again. The retractable roof loomed hundreds of feet above her. Why hadn’t it collapsed?
“How are you feeling, dear?” A young man leaned over her. He wore a stethoscope around his neck, a facemask, and a headlamp in the middle of his forehead
“Hurts.”
“You’re in luck.” He reached over her head and tapped the IV feed to her wrist. “We have pain medication today.”
Dixie looked away as he prepared a syringe. She wondered how her family was. Were Michael and Rowan safe? Did they know where she was and what had happened? Were they searching for her? In the dim glow of the emergency lights she saw rows of people spread out around her, some on stretchers, some on gurneys, some on blankets on the ground. People with bandaged limbs and faces. Some wailed and wept. Some lay as still as corpses. They all had names and mothers and fathers and sons and daughters and lovers and friends. Would families ever be reunited?