Free Moving Forward in Reverse by Martin Scott, Coryanne Hicks Page A

were in the midst of a relay race. ( I
hope you’re winning.)
    He strode to my right side. Joanne tugged on the foot of the bed
so Dr. H could move behind me. I looked across my body at Amber. She winked and
smiled at me. Blood now saturated the towel and was dribbling from the ends. It
dawned on me then that I must be in deep shit for Amber to smile like that.
    ‘Scott,’ Dr. Henrickson said from somewhere above me, ‘I need to
put in a central line. It’s going to be painful but if I don’t do it you’ll
bleed out before we can get you to surgery.’ Bleed out, I silently
repeated. Translation: die.
    I blinked at him, which apparently wasn’t enough consent because
he prompted, ‘Okay?’
    I didn’t say a word or move a muscle.
    Someone lowered the head of my bed until it was below the level of
my feet. Dr. Henrickson wiped something down the right side of my neck. He
barked out orders to the second nurse and I felt fingers pressing into my neck.
They pressed, paused, then shifted and pressed again. After a moment they found
what they were looking for and held fast.
    A sharp pinch at the side of my neck. I wanted to flinch away.
Pain or death , those were my options .
    Tears stung my eyes. He had told me it would hurt. I hadn’t
understood how much.
    Pure, unadulterated pain washed over me. Suddenly it was all true:
this was me; that was my blood on the walls; it was my life they were trying to
save. None of it had felt real without the pain – agonizing, brutalizing pain.
    My vision wavered between blindingly white light and crisp
clarity. Two men raced in with a gurney. I saw them advance on me from the left
in spurts of lucidity. I was lifted and shifted. Then we were on the move. I
could hear Dr. Henrickson’s cool voice hovering around me, Stay with us,
Scott! Stay with us…
    I could see the flash of lights passing overhead and felt a chill
settle over me . When we rolled out of the elevator into the familiar
pallor of the operating room, my teeth chattered around a gaping yawn.
    So tuh-tired, I thought and shivered as we entered the OR.
    ‘Hi, Scott,’ an unfamiliar male voice said, accompanied by a firm
hand on my shoulder. I lifted my eyelids one fraction at a time and struggled
to focus on the masked face above me. The impression I got was of round jolliness.
He had nice, close-set eyes and dark barely-receding hair.
    ‘I’m Dr. Mixter,’ the jolly doctor said. ‘You don’t remember me,
but we spent some time together last month.’ Just behind this unfamiliar doctor
someone was tinkering with a tray of tools. Surgical tools, my muddied
brain determined.
    Dr. Mixter was replaced by a female assistant as he moved to the
other end of the table. The apples of her cheeks bulged and her eyes wrinkled
around the edge of her mask.
    ‘Everything’s okay, Scott,’ she said softly, stroking my hair with
one hand. ‘Everything’s okay.’ Her cheeks stayed rounded at the edge of her
smile, but the expression in her eyes wavered as she watched me.
    Things didn’t look so “okay” in her eyes.
    ~~~
    He stood by my feet, leaning forward slightly. The light blue
shirt beneath his white lab coat, dark tie knotted around his neck, and
expression of compassionate severity on his face all too familiar.
    Gazing up at Dr. Mixter from my bed, I could see Dr. Henrickson
stooping over me to say I was officially another digit in the statistics of the
flesh-eating disease. Dr. Henrickson telling me machines were the only things
between me and death. Dr. Henrickson telling me my hands and feet were gone and
I was lucky to be alive.
    Here I was again: about to receive a similar prognosis from a
different doctor on a different day in a different unit of the same hospital.
Had I really achieved so much in these past weeks?
    ‘How’re you feeling today, Scott?’ Dr. Mixter asked.
    ‘Alive.’
    He chuckled, but I hadn’t meant it as a joke. Yesterday was very
nearly the last day I would have felt anything, and it