The young girl lies on a gurney in the hallway outside the CT room,braces and mechanical gear holding her mangled 17 year-old body together. Her eyes stare into a fluorescent world that feels brutally different than any nightmare she had ever experienced, her mouth gaping at the side unnaturally as if muscles cannot remember how her smile used to work before the accident, or if there was ever a smile to begin with.
Her single mother stoically pushes away the thought of sleep. She knows there will be none anytime soon. A technician in dreadlocks pushes a machine into the room to her right. Jokes bounce off the tile from inside. No one laughs in the hallway, however. The jokes are for employees only.
From the opposite direction comes another girl in a wheelchair, PICC line cinched in an armband, a girl not much older in years than the first girl, but decades older inside. She looks serene, almost happy in a weary way. Wheelchair girl knows every hallway here, every elevator, every floor, every view out every window, every style of room. She has been in almost all of them. She knows the tired women who do the housekeeping. She knows the tired nurses and tired doctors and tired residents. She has met them all under the worst possible circumstances. She knows what days fried chicken is served in the cafeteria, and when the therapy dogs come by, and what it feels like to have a deadly staph infection eating away at metal plates and screws in her bones.
The two girls eyes meet. They each recognize the pain in the other. There is a pause. The girl in the wheelchair reaches up to touch the arm of the girl on the gurney. Gurney girl’s eyes widen as the Dilaudid mixes with Percoset in her veins. The motion of compassion jiggles the IV bag.
“Are you afraid of the pain?” asks wheelchair girl who has weaned herself from pain meds many times. “Are you afraid you will never walk again?”
There is a strained pause.
“Yes,” says gurney girl. The word catches in her throat as if it has barbs and will not come out. Pain is the tread that holds everything together in this place.
Wheelchair girl has been here for six months and nine surgeries. She has beaten the fear, tolerated the pain, and overcome the odds. She knows things the doctors will never know. She knows what the nurses fear. Wheelchair girl has cried through horrors that morphine and all of its hydro-cousins could not dull.
“You will not walk,” says wheelchair girl.
Gurney girl recoils slightly at the bluntness of the words.
“You will run,” says wheelchair girl. “And so will I. Soon.”
Gurney girl nods, a small amount of hope filling her face. A longer, silent conversation has taken place that only they can hear. Wheelchair girl makes her way down the hall to another test, smiling.
