Biting the other side of my cheek, I stared at the spot on Jude’s neck where the faintest movement could be detected. I started holding my breath, waiting in torture for his pulse to lift that patch of skin again.
As long as he had a pulse, he was alive.
A couple more trainers ran onto the field, carrying a stretcher. The players moved away, hanging their heads as they wandered back to the sidelines. Nestling the stretcher beside Jude, the five trainers positioned themselves around him, sliding their hands into place.
I didn’t let go of his hand as they hoisted him onto the stretcher and I didn’t let go of his hand as they made their way off the field.
I wasn’t sure if the stadium had gone silent, or I was just incapable of hearing anything in my shock, but I didn’t hear a sound as we moved Jude off the field.
Only when we were through one of the team tunnels did I hear the blare of an ambulance siren. The paramedics were just swinging the back doors open when we emerged outside. One of the trainers told them what had happened and what injuries they thought he may have sustained. When the words concussion, coma, and paralyzed were voiced, I had to tune it out. I had to pretend reality wasn’t so real right now.
Transferring him into the ambulance, I followed behind the paramedic, taking a seat before I could be kicked out.
“Who are you?” he hollered over at me as the trainers stepped away as the doors slammed shut.
“I’m the only family he’s got,” I whispered, trying not to let the crowd watching us drive away, like we were a hearse on its way to a funeral, cripple me.
Rushing through an emergency room, while a person I loved was shuttled to the front of the line due to his injuries, was an episode I never wanted to replay in my life. Hurrying him into a room, I was ordered to stay outside in the waiting room.
Two security guards had to be called when I told a certain sour faced nurse to go, eh-hmm, herself. They took one look at me, crazed and worried out of my mind, and let me off with a warning.
Pacing the waiting room, I had to fight the urge at least a hundred times to shove past the security guard who’d clearly been instructed to keep an eye on me. My phone rang every minute as all of Jude’s acquaintances and friends wanted to know how he was doing.
I turned it off after ten minutes. What could I tell them? He’d been sequestered to an emergency room while more doctors rushed into his room than onto a golf course on a sunny Saturday morning? To give any of them an answer to how Jude was doing, I’d either have to lie or admit things that I was sure I couldn’t admit.
So I paced. I chewed my nails down to nothing. I ached in every place I didn’t realize could ache. But I wouldn’t let myself think, or contemplate, or consider any one of the many things that would break me if I let them in right now. I was barely hanging on as it was, behaving like nothing better than a caged animal; if I let in any one of the emotions piling up , no vial of tranquilizer could subdue me.
It could have been fifteen minutes, it could have been fifteen hours, but when the serious faced doctor ambled into the waiting room, his eyes shifting my way, it took a lifetime for him to cross the room towards me.
“I understand you’re somehow related to Mr. Ryder,” he said, crossing his arms. He wasn’t covered in blood, so I assured myself that was a good sign.
“Yes,” I said, my voice hoarse. I was related to him in every way a person could be without the bond of blood relation.
“He’s sustained a concussion from the impact,” he began as my insides twisted. “I’ve put him into a medically induced coma to give his brain and body a chance to heal, but we won’t know the full extent of the damage until he wakes.”
I swallowed the bile rising in my throat. “He’s all right?” My voice was barely a whisper.
“He’s alive,” the doctor corrected. “We won’t know if he’s all right until he wakes. Until then, he needs to take it easy and rest.”
A nurse stuck her head around the corner. “Doctor,” she interrupted, “we’ve got a bullet wound to the stomach coming in.”
Giving her a nod over his shoulder, he started backing away. “We’ve moved him up to the fifth floor. You can go see him now if you like.”
“Thank you,” I said as he rushed off because what else could you offer the person who had helped the one you loved?
Following the signs that led to the elevator, I punched the fifth floor button, followed by a trio of punches over the “door close” button. My legs were bouncing, my breath was catching, my fingers were tapping over the elevator handrail. My anxiety was manifesting in a hyper active way so, the instant the doors whooshed open, I flew out, rushing towards the nurses’s station.
“Excuse me?” I asked, my voice sounding as hyper as the rest of my body felt. “Could you tell me which room Jude Ryder was taken to?” I didn’t wait for the middle-aged, smile wrinkled woman to look up from her chart before asking.
When she did, the smile that had earned her those wrinkles worked into position. Maybe the reason she was a fifth floor nurse was because she was five times warmer than the sour faced nurses in the E.R.
“He was just taken into 512,” she said, pointing down the hall on the right. “You can go see him right now. Just make sure he gets lots of quiet and rest, okay, hun?”
“Okay. I will,” I said, wrapping my arms around my stomach. “The doctor said they put him into a coma so his brain could heal. Any idea when he’ll wake up?” There were about a million questions I had now that I hadn’t thought to ask the doctor while he was in front of me.
“Could be next week,” she said, with a shrug. “Could be next hour. The brain is a tricky thing that’s got a mind all its own.” She smiled at her little pun. “The docs like to think they can command it to do their bidding, but in my experience, the brain wins every time.”
Why couldn’t all medical staff be as grounded and honest as this one was? “Sounds very… inconclusive.”
“Hun, whenever you’re talking about the human body or brain, it’s always inconclusive.”
Not exactly what I needed to hear right now, but I’d take the hard truth over a warm fuzzy lie most any day.
“Thanks,” I said, waving as I headed down the hall.
“Let us know if you all need anything,” she called after me.
Room 512 was at the far end of the hall and the closer I got, the farther away the room seemed to get. This whole night had been a screwy version of Alice in Wonderland.
Sliding inside the room, I closed the door silently behind me. Looking at him on the bed, if I imagined it just right, I could pretend he was asleep in his own bed. But then the heart rate monitor beeped and the antiseptic smell of the hospital called me back to reality.
I didn’t have an aversion to hospitals like most people did. To me, they were places your loved ones were taken who at least had a hope of being healed. When John had been shot, the only place for him to be taken was the medical examiner’s.
Jude was here, his heartbeat spiking and beating every second. That meant he was alive and had a fighting chance. There was hope.
Coming around the foot of the bed, I stared down at him. If not for the hospital gown and wires and tubes snaking over his body, he looked like he didn’t belong here. No stitched wounds, no black and blue marks spotting him, no casts supporting broken bones. Everything on the surface was perfect, but whatever was going on inside that brain of his was where the true threat waited.
I knew more about concussions than any one who wasn’t a doctor should. Watching hundreds of games in my lifetime, I’d seen my fair share of boys knocked senseless. John had been lucky enough to escape the seeming rite of passage concussion, but plenty of his teammates growing up hadn’t. Most recovered with little to no long term effects. But some, the names and faces that were at the forefront of my mind now, were forever changed. Those less fortunate souls would never walk onto that football field again, and a couple couldn’t so much as lift a spoon to their mouths, let alone palm a football.