The Rude Awakening

Chris woke up, groggy not realizing where he was, or how he'd gotten there. He was in a bed, but not his, but a bed, nonetheless. "Wh-What? Where am I? Lemme think. Okay, the last thing I remember was driving to the office. I received a text message from Sarah." He thought to himself, "Damn, that 18-Wheeler must have rear-ended me! Man, my shoulder is killing me!" Chris lifted his head off of his pillow and looked around the room he was in. After slowly taking in his surroundings, he realized he was in a hospital. Something wasn't right. There weren't any normal hospital noises; machines running, people talking, nurses and doctors moving quickly through the hallways. He could hear muffled bumping noises above him and below him. Maybe it was that "quiet-time" rule he had seen on the news one time? "I'm calling the nurse." Chris went to grab the call-box switch to his left. "Holy Shit! Where's my fucking arm?!"


Chris quickly sat up, ran the fingers of his right hand across the stitched-up stump and turned to get out of bed. He slid off the bed to stand up and his legs collapsed. His face slapped the cold tile floor. “Oh, God! Please don’t tell me I can’t walk!” Chris lay on the floor and his feet started tingling. “Aw man. I’m not paralyzed; my legs were just asleep. Man, I thought I was in trouble!” The tingling grew as movement began in Chris' legs. His toes, feets, ankles and legs started moving again. Simultaneously, as feeling was regaining in his legs; depression was flooding his heart.

Minutes seemed like hours for the realization to settle in that Chris was now an amputee. Even worse, Chris started whimpering when he had to pull the near-dry catheter out. Chris always had a sarcastic sense of humor so after the tears of “why me?” and the anger of “this never should have happened!” subsided, he looked in the hospital room’s mirror and told himself, “Great buddy, now you’re a tripod.”

Chris pinched the tears away with the front of his hospital robe; snorted and swallowed the mucus down his throat and vowed to make the best of his situation. “How long have I been out?” He started rummaging around the room searching for anything that could give him a timeframe after his brain-outage. “Please enjoy your stay at First Baptist Hospital.” One sign read. A dry-erase board read, “Your Nurse Today Is: Ali.” He opened a closet and found a navy blue suitcase.

Chris unzipped the suitcase and found one set of clothes and a note: “Baby, these clothes are for your trip home in case I’m stuck at work. I love you and I can’t wait for you to come back to me. In case you wake up and I’m not there, I’m there everyday after work at about 5:30. I love you, baby, Sarah.”

He began to get angrier since his frame of time wasn’t staring him in the face when he looked above the muted ant wars on television…an atomic clock. “Oh, thank God!”

“July 25th, 6:16pm.” He was elated to get an idea of what time it was. Chris was reminded of a Dalton Trumbo book he read in high school called “Johnny Got His Gun” that was about a WWI soldier that jumped on a grenade to save his platoon only to wake up not being able to see, hear, or eat because he had no face or limbs; he was literally a piece of meat that was thinking. The soldier was driven crazy for the knowledge of what time it was when a nurse tapped on the chest of his torso in Morse code, “Merry Christmas” the soldier was extremely happy. Chris felt that kind of joy. He continued to search the room and found a nurse’s cart at the foot of his bed.