Blunt Force Drama

Ouch! The rain stings my face. Literally stings my face. I don’t think it’s just rain.

I hurry up the steps towards the parking lot and the shelter of my car. As I climb the side of the hill, it’s definitely turning from a cold rain to ice pellets. Damn, I will probably need to scrape my windshield. More time out in the cold. I was hoping we were past most of this.

Finally at the top, I step off the curb and onto the pavement. Oh shit, this is slippery. I’m going over and there's nothing I can do about it. Fuck, this is going to hurt.

I come to looking up at several people standing around me. Damn it, my head hurts, can they just be quiet. But their voices sound weird, kind of muffled. Looking at them, I don’t see any mouths moving. Jesus, my head really hurts.

I start to sit up, but that makes everything worse, so I just stay laying down. A normal sounding voice, says “Just lay there, we called 9-1-1. Your head is bleeding pretty badly.”

An angelic face looks down at me and I can see her lips move.

“Would everyone else be quiet, so I can hear what she’s saying.”

I see the other faces look at each other. They seem confused. I’m confused. But my head hurts. Closing my eyes feels better.

I try to cover my ears to keep the voices out. It doesn’t help, but I can feel wet in my hair. A warm wet, not this cold ice and rain. I bring my fingers in front of me and look at them. They're painted red. I suddenly feel woozy.

“Sir, can you move your toes?”

A deep male voice, a normal voice, brings me back to the world. I open my eyes and see a paramedic leaning over me. I can see the red flashing of the ambulance lights.

I wiggle both my feet. The other voices have dimmed a bit. But the normal one speaks again. I can see the paramedic’s lips moving as I hear, “Good. We’re going to lift your head slightly to try to get a bandage on to stop the bleeding. Then we’re going to lift you on to the gurney. Are you okay with that?”

I start to nod my head, but the shooting pain makes it clear just how bad an idea that is. Instead, I say, “Yes. Am I okay?”

“Hopefully. We’ll take you in to the hospital to see if you broke anything. You probably have a concussion. And you’ve lost a fair amount of blood.”

“I feel funny. And everyone keeps talking without their lips moving. Everyone all at once.”

They lift my head slightly. I can feel some pressure around it.

“We're going to put a neck brace on you, just to be safe.”

They pull something under my neck and fasten it around. I hear a second ambulance arrive.

“We're going to roll you up and strap you to a spinal board.”

Two more paramedics have come up. Three of them roll me onto my side and then back down and I’m strapped to something.

My head is fuzzy and there are way too many voices in it. And it hurts. Jesus, does it hurt.

I’m put onto a cot like thing, then they lift it and me into the back of the ambulance. A paramedic climbs in and sits next to me.

Do these voices mean I’m going crazy? The back of the ambulance shuts; suddenly I only hear one “other voice” clearly. That voice is going through some kind of a medical checklist. The other paramedic gets in the front and now I hear a second voice. It’s not nearly as loud as the first one. The soft one is watching traffic, looking for an opening to turn into.

It dawns on me. The clear one is the paramedic sitting with me. The soft one is the paramedic driving the ambulance. I’m hearing their internal dialogues. I can read their minds. Maybe I am crazy now, but those internal conversations make sense.

Thinking about this makes my head hurt even more. I close my eyes and try to ignore the voices. I can drop them down to background murmurs, which is a relief. I think I’m drifting back off.

All of a sudden, the ambulance is backing up. The door swings open and I’m being wheeled into the emergency room. The voices in my head erupt louder than ever. Many of them are screaming; some in pain, some in fear, some in sorrow, a few in anger. Most of the quieter ones are just tired, with lots of medical jargon I barely recognize, all pouring out faster than I can process any of it.

A nurse is talking to one of the paramedics as they lead me into a room, getting a brief snapshot of my case. We stop in a cordoned off area with curtains around it. I recognize this setup. It’s just like the emergency room where my mom brought me eight years ago, when I broke my arm in a fall.

The nurse turns to say goodbye to the paramedics. As she does, I hear her inner voice clearly for just a moment. She has serious hots for the paramedic who rode with me. I get no sense from him that he recognizes it. It might’ve just been lost in the commotion.

“My name is Sara. Can you tell me your name?” the nurse asks me.

“Matthew Bergman.”

“Are you a student at the university, Matthew?”

“Can everyone just shut up so I can hear her!” I shout.

I close my eyes for a minute and try to focus. I’m able to quiet the yelling down a bit,

“Are you okay, Matthew?”

“Yeah, I can just hear everyone. In my head I think. If I work at it, I can make them be quieter. And yes, I’m a junior. Am I crazy?”

“I don’t know. Has anyone contacted your family?”

Staring at her, I find I can focus on her inner voice to almost the complete exclusion of the others. It is kind of like trying to listen to somebody at a party. Listening to her inner voice makes it easier to understand her normal voice.

“I doubt it.”

“Is there someone we should contact to let them know you’re here?

“I guess my mom or dad should know. 784 319 4712.”

She is worried about me. Especially that I’m hearing voices.

“I will see they get called in the next few minutes. Do you have any medical conditions we should know about? Any medications you take?”

“As far as I know, I’m a healthy twenty year old. At least until I slipped on the ice.”

“Have you taken anything else recently? Drugs or alcohol or pills?”

She’s expecting me to say yes.

“No. I was in class, so I was completely sober. I guess I’m just crazy. I do drink some at parties and I’ve smoked pot, but nothing in a week and a half. And not much that weekend either, just a beer and sharing a joint, Saturday at a party.”

“Is it possible that something else was in the joint? Have you had any other strange symptoms over the last week?”

“Nope, everything’s been normal.”

She’s not happy with that answer, but she believes me. Mostly at least.

“I’m going to check under your bandage to see how bad the wound is. The paramedics mentioned you lost a fair amount of blood.”

“Oh my god. That is gnarly.”

I think that was her internal voice, but I’m not sure.

“How does it look?”

“Not too good. You’re going to at least need multiple stitches. Maybe more. I think more than we can do here.”

She is worried about the wound. She is worried about me. She thinks I might be crazy.

My head is really throbbing. The concentration to block out the other voices is hard.

She says, “I’ll be back in a few minutes, Matthew.”

She does come back, I think shortly, bringing someone else with her.

“Matthew, this is Doctor Floyd. She will briefly examine you. And determine what our next steps will be.”

I’m having a bit of a trouble coping with the two internal voices at once.

“How are you feeling, Matthew?”

I can hear the difference in the voices as I listen, They sound different, if sound is even the right word to use. The nurse is very worried about me. The doctor is skeptical of what the nurse has told her.

“My head hurts like hell. I’m getting a bit nauseous.”

“Are you hearing voices still?”

“If I concentrate, I can keep it down to you two, which is manageable. But the effort does make my head hurt worse.”

“How do you know it’s the two of us?”

“It was only in the ambulance I figured out what was happening, where the voices were coming from.But I can tell you’re skeptical of all this. I keep thinking I must be crazy, but all the conversations make sense. You first thought Sara was exaggerating, but you’re now thinking of getting a psychiatrist to come check me out. Sara is worried about me. She believes I hear something, but she assumes it's just noise my brain is generating. And she's worried about my wound. I think she called it gnarly.

“Oh, and Sara, you should tell the paramedic you think he’s hot. He’s got no idea you’re interested in him.”

Sara turns bright red. Doctor Floyd turns and glances at her and she nods her head yes.

“Okay. Let’s ignore that issue for now and start with your others. Can you move all four limbs?”

I wiggle each foot and raise each hand, wiggling all ten fingers.

“Good. Let me look at this gnarly wound. Can you sit up a little bit, so I can look at the back of your head?”

I sit up a bit, with Sara helping me. My head reels a bit.

The doctor loosens my bandage at looks. I can hear her inner voice’s reaction.

“I told you Sara said it was gnarly. You should’ve believed her. So I have to get an x-ray and some sort of a scan of my brain to make sure I’m healthy enough for the procedure to clean up the back of my head. And, yuck, there’s some gunk from the parking lot in there.”

Sara asks the doctor, “Is he right with all that?”

“Yeah, he is. There is no way he should know that. I need to get the orders in for him and then call someone in neurology. I’m not looking forward to explaining this one. Give him a thousand milligrams of acetaminophen and keep him as isolated as you can in here.”

She really is dreading that conversation. Maybe I really am reading minds.

I take the pills and try to close my eyes and shut everything out for a while.