Free Moving Forward in Reverse by Martin Scott, Coryanne Hicks

wishes she could
take my place? It couldn’t be. No one would wish for this. But that’s what
she had said. I watched the quaking in her rounded shoulders and felt sorrow
that stretched far deeper than the self-pity I’d been swimming in all day.
    I wanted to say something – anything – to help her stop crying,
but what words could fix this? Never – not at any point along this torturous
journey had I wished what happened to me upon anyone else. And never had I
thought that someone I cared so deeply about, whom clearly cared a great deal
for me, would wish to take my place. It was the last thing I would want.
    Does she feel responsible? I wondered. The mere thought agonized me to the
core. This was no one’s fault. A fluke, a random occurrence when all the stars
had happened to line up against me. I thought everyone had reconciled with that
fact at least as much as I had. But clearly not because my mom was sobbing
silently by the window.
    I watched her in my own helpless misery. I wanted to reach out to
her, but I was still a hostage of this bed. I wanted to console her with words,
but none seemed worthy. So I let my arms fall to my sides in defeat, resigned
now to be the audience to my mother’s suffering as she had been witness to
mine.
    There is still so much healing left to be done.

Bleeding Out is Cold
     
     
    I stared at Amber’s blood-splattered face and she smiled back. How
had this happened? The week had been going so well in comparison to the last,
what with my dalliances with Kathy and growing dexterity with the hooks. And
now this?
    Dazed, I shook my head and tried to remember. Amber had come to
change the bandages on my feet – a routine procedure I underwent every few
days. We were chatting amicably, swapping hospital gossip and news, and then
there was blood. So much blood. It began spraying around the room, gushing from
the end of my left foot.
    ‘I’ve got a bleeder!’ she yelled as she clamped her hand over my
foot. But the blood wouldn’t stop. It started squirting through the gaps in her
fingers. Frantically, she grabbed the gauze she had just removed and bunched it
at the top of my foot. Lines of red streaked her face, neck, and clothing.
Splatters adorned the wall behind her.
    I stared wide-eyed at the scene before me: blood-washed like the
crime scene of a murder mystery, Amber saturated in red like Stephen King’s
Carrie. This can’t all be coming from me. The blood was everywhere;
seeping through the gauze, staining her hands, clumping in her hair, drooling
down her cheek.
    Another nurse came sprinting into my room with Dr. Henrickson, who
happened to be in the unit, on her heels. ‘Hey, Doc H!’ I said – or thought, I
couldn’t be sure which – in happy surprise. Whatever the case, he paid me no
mind as he headed straight for the bathroom.
    Hope he isn’t about to puke, I thought facetiously.
    He had a towel in his hand when he came back out. ‘Get a central
line kit, Joanne,’ he said coolly to the second nurse. I realized I was smiling
dopily at the scene unfolding before me as if I really were watching a movie. That’s
not right, I thought and tried to straighten my expression.
    Dr. Henrickson wrapped the towel around my foot. Amber slid her
hands from the gauze to the towel, squeezing so hard the veins on her neck
popped out. I probably should have felt fear – my life was on the line, after
all – but I wasn’t afraid. I trusted the people who now held my life in their
hands (again). Whatever the outcome, I’d know they’d done everything they could
and no one could have done more.
    A gasp from the left drew my attention. Kathy stood in the
doorway, her expression aghast. She spun on her heels and dashed off, yelling,
‘I’ll call surgery,’ over her shoulder as she went.
    Surgery? I thought in dismay. I hated surgery. They did a lot of cutting in
surgery.
    The second nurse was back. She passed a surgical kit off to Dr.
Henrickson as if it was a baton and they