That evening Aleksei did not show up at the hospital. I came to my senses a couple of times, and then again fell into a heavy, drugged sleep. They put me on an intravenous drip to wash the poison from the burnt tissue out of my body, but my heart stopped because of that.
My temperature shot up to 105.8. They were worried about my brain. I had to be given drugs intravenously to lower the fever, but that was also dangerous for my heart. I heard the doctors argue about something at my bedside, but I could not concentrate enough to understand what they were saying. In the end, on the edge of consciousness I caught that the doctors were split over my condition: some of them wanted to transfer me to a special burn ward in the regional hospital, while others were against such a transfer. The question was if I could survive such a transfer. For better or for worse, I stayed where I was.
Occasionally, coming to my senses, I saw Dr. Viacheslav Dmitrievich sitting at my bed, holding my hand and checking my pulse. Each time I tried to smile, but fell asleep again. As I learned later, he spent four days and nights like that, sitting in that chair.
I found out later I died at least a dozen of times during these four days. I depended for my life on this doctor, who sat by my bed all the time. Each time my heart failed to beat I was revived and brought back to life.
Finally, on the fifth day, I woke up blurred, my mind darkened, but sane. The doctors were doing the rounds. Approaching my bed they smiled, knowing that my young, though weak, body had defeated death.
“Good morning, butterfly! Wings still hurt?”
I burst into tears, not able to express any words of gratitude, knowing that no words could show how thankful I was. But the doctors, there were four of them, understood everything without words. They were happy because they were able to pull me out of the jaws of death.
“Today we have a double celebration,” said Nikolai Ivanovich, the head of the department. “First of all, all together we’ve helped a pretty girl, Polina, come into the world of the living for the second time. And secondly, Viacheslav Dmitrievich is going on vacation. So, girl, behave yourself. Okay?”
He laughed and walked away. I felt as if I were lying under a train. It seemed like I weighed three hundred pounds. Not only my feet and legs hurt, but every cell of the body ached. My memory was returning, and I involuntarily began to recollect what had happened during these past four days. I couldn’t remember seeing the man, with whom I spent seventeen years of my life, here by my bedside. But I had to quit trying to understand, and had to come back to reality.
I was recuperating from severe burns, beginning to heal, and that meant hunger. My body was starving for food, demanding the immense number of kilocalories required to repair massive thermal damage.