Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Now the real nightmare begins...

This part of my story is the hardest to write. I will never forget the day I woke up. Nell was sitting in the chair across from me. There was small talk about how I was feeling then I asked where my Mom was. The words "she didn't make it" didn't seem real...they couldn't be real. Even today, almost 2 years later, they don't seem real.  She was fine. The last words I remember her saying to me were that she would be with me as soon as she got out of the hospital. Now you are telling me she she died??  Not only had she died from complications of pneumonia, but she had been buried almost 2 weeks before I found out she was even gone. This was all too much!  Suddenly the realization of how long I had been asleep hit me. It was either just before or just after Christmas...I had been out for basically a month. Looking for anything else to talk about, anything else to think about, I asked who was taking care of my cat, Driscoll, that lived with Mom. Oh yeah, he had gotten sick and, since he was so old, they had to put him to sleep. This couldn't be happening. I was scared to ask another question. I couldn't take anything else. After Nell left, I tried to make sense of things. Everyone was calling to check on me and tell me how sorry they were but that just made me realize that everyone knew Mom was gone but me!  There were so many emotions that I could never begin to explain how I felt. At times I was too numb to feel. A group of my friends had driven to Temple to be with me the day Mom died. They knew that the doctors wouldn't allow anyone to tell me but they wanted to be with me.  My best friend, Shermaine, the one that everyone thinks is so tough, broke down and cried when she found out.  As much as I loved everyone for caring so much, there was a lot of anger too. 

How could everyone let this happen and not tell me?  How could this have happened at all?  I was mad at myself for not being with Mom at the end. I was mad at the girl that hit us. I was mad at Mom for leaving me. I was mad at God for everything. I was mad at the world. Mad was easier than sad. 

Slowly I began to realize that losing Mom was not all I had to deal with. The reason I had been out for so long was that I had almost died several times. My injuries from the crash were severe. My pelvis was broken on the right side and severely broken on the left. My left femur was so badly shattered that they had to insert a rod in it and my spleen had a laceration. As if this wasn't enough, my lower left leg had been mangled by the wreck to the point that they had almost resorted to amputating it to get me out of the car. I hadn't realized it had taken 45 minutes to for them to get out. 

It was all too much to comprehend. During a month that my clearest memory was of a hallucination of driving into my apartment, my life had collapsed around me. I wanted to go back to sleep, at times I wanted to die. Unfortunately, the time to sleep was over. Now it was time to fight. I just didn't know if I had the strength or the desire to fight anymore.

No comments:

Post a Comment