5
Riley
Transfer
“Good morning, Mr. Cruz.” LeAnn – apparently that’s her name – my young nurse sashays into my room with a bright smile and too much perfume. She snaps open the curtains of what I’ve come to consider my fucking dungeon, and snags the piss bottle from my bedside table.
Gloves on, pour, flush, wash, return.
The monotony of my incompetence hurts my soul. It hurts me in ways I never could have expected. So when she brings back the now wet urinal and sets it on my bedside table, her brown eyes mock me. “Need to poop? I can help you transfer.”
Rage bubbles in my blood until I feel the burn. So much rage. So much fucking anger. “No. Please leave.”
“Did you poop yesterday, Mr. Cruz?” She speaks to me like I’m three. “You need to show us regular bowel movements, otherwise we can’t discharge you. The medications in your system can make you constipated, and if left too long, could cause you a lot of damage.”
“I’ll take a shit later.” I bare my teeth until her eyes widen. “On my own.”
“O-o-o-kay.” She hustles to the end of my bed and flips open my chart. The best part of being the rookie, the baby-faced idiot, is no one expects you to get angry. So when you do, they sit the fuck up and pay attention.Bravo! I’ve found a positive to always being the joke. “Mr. Cruz.” LeAnn lowers the chart just an inch. “I need to do my job, and I care that you’re okay. So I need you to transfer to your wheelchair, and I’d rather you did it without trying to intimidate me.”
“I’m not trying to intimidate you. I’m trying to be left alone.”
“You’re in a hospital; our job is to literally see to your needs. Your chart says you’re booked in at nine for a visit from the hospital physical therapists. Doctors will make rounds at eight. You’re being discharged in twenty-four hours, which means you need to be able to transfer from bed to chair.” She glances toward the wheelchair in the far corner. “I know you don’t want it, but this is what you need to do to get out. Please don’t fight me on it.”
Dropping my chart back at the end of my bed and turning away, she leaves with none of the happiness she arrived with. That’s me now. The sucker of happiness, the thief of joy. The fucking asshole with one leg who needs help to take a shit.
Turning to the bedside table and grabbing my cell, I wade through the billion texts people still send me. They think they’ll cheer me up, like a text will replace a leg and reverse everything that’s happened. Alex says he’ll come visit around nine.No thanks.Oz says he dropped by to see my mom yesterday afternoon.I didn’t fucking tell him to do that!Libby Tate promises to come this afternoon with brownies and a shoulder to cry on.Absolutely not.Andi says nothing.
Funny; the one person in the world I expected an argument from is the only one who listens when I tell her to fuck off. She saw me in here, realized I was a freak, took her leave, and ran for the hills.
Good. I don’t want her here. I don’t want to look into her eyes ever again.
My phone remains void of any texts from a Bishop; Kane or Jay.
According to Alex, they’re both gone.Dead. While I was unconscious and being operated on, the guys I spent the last year trying to help, the brothers I considered my friends, were shot and killed. Just like that. Friends. Brothers. Decorated agents. All of it is gone, and now I sit in my own putrid rage and wish I was with them.
Die a hero. Forever remain a hero.
Kane and Jay Bishop will never be asked if they need help taking a shit.
Before any nurses can come back, before the physical therapists can come play hero, I reach up to the handle hanging over my bed and grunt when my aching stomach rejects the way my core muscles fire up. Holding my breath, I shuck my blankets off and refuse to look at my leg. Wrapped in bandages and a black brace, missing from below the knee, I don’t look at it. I don’t acknowledge it. I simply focus on the bullet hole in my gut and the bruising that stretches from my navel right around to the back of my ribs. I activate what little core strength I have left and slam my teeth against my bicep to get through the pain.
It’s like the bullet tore my stomach apart. Like it got in there with an egg beater and messed everything up just to make sure I was hurting.
Using my upper body strength and the handle, I turn on the bed until my legs dangle over the side. Blood rushes to what remains of my left leg and pulses hard enough I wonder if it’ll spray out of the bottom. Pausing, breathing, I watch my residual limb and wait for the blood. I wait to bleed out and go back to sleep.
But of course it doesn’t come. I’m not given that escape. So I stretch dangerously far over the edge of the bed and snag one of the crutches the nurses left in here yesterday. My head whooshes with dizziness. I haven’t been fully upright since before I was brought in here, so the blood moves around in my brain, in my body, and when the stars clear from my eyes, I maneuver the crutch under my left arm and slide off the bed until my right foot touches the floor.
My body screams in pain. My stomach. My missing leg. My left thigh, where the second bullet hacked at the muscle. Tears surge to the surface and make my eyes itch, but they don’t spill over. They won’t. I refuse to accept that weakness when I have so many others.
Gaining my balance, however shaky it is, I let go of the bed and reach out for the second crutch. Fear races through my blood in the single second it takes to grab it and bring it under my arm. Fear of falling. Fear of the staples in my leg bursting open. Fear of being stuck on the floor and powerless to get up again.
I watch my closed door and hold my breath, like they can hear my heart and will run in at any moment. Blood throbs in my leg, it throbs against the bandaging and hurts so much my stomach rolls.
Working the crutches under weak arms, I take a shaky step toward the corner. Then a second. I move slower than a turtle, shakier than a dead leaf in the wind, but I move, and what feels like a lifetime later, arrive at the wheelchair. I balance on my leg and one crutch, set the other against the wall, then I move the wheelchair so the handles touch the wall. I’ll be damned if I came all this way just for the fucker to roll away when I’m trying to sit.
Breathing through the pain, and knowing with dread I’ll have to make the trip all over again soon to get back to my bed, I turn and lower into what will be my seat for the rest of my life.
A wheelchair.
I’m a wheelchair user like all the geriatric folks in my mom’s home.
Left to rot, and waiting to die.
When LeAnn traipses into my room an hour later with her fake cheer and bouncy steps, and stops with a gasp at my empty bed, I wait for her eyes, then I nod. “I transferred.”