The Face of a Borg Chapter 3

I spent some time staring at the ceiling before calling the nurse with the call button, which I’d found on the remote to my bed.

One came in to the room shortly.

“So….” I rasped, “I wan—“ my voice gave out.

I tried again. “I want to—“

I sighed, making a face, grabbing my paper from where it now sat on my bedside table. “I want to get up,” I wrote.

She read this, making a thoughtful face before replying. “Let me check your charts, see what restrictions if any are on you sitting up, and we’ll see.”

She retreated toward the computer screen at the door, where she spent a moment typing on the touchscreen before scrolling through reading notes, then returned to my bedside where she replied.

“Well, it looks like you can try sitting up now. Let me get someone else to help, and get the chair ready, and we’ll need to move your urine collections bag—“

I made a face. “Bag?” I managed to get the word out.

“Yes, according to your chart, since you were so ill for so long, you’ve been catheterized since you came here. You might notice you haven’t been getting up to go yourself. Although, I suppose, if you can sit up for a while, I can talk to the doctors about removing it. If you’re strong enough now to maintain bladder control we can try a day with a bedpan, and then if you’re strong enough, possibly try getting you to go to the toilet.”

I frowned as I listened, nodding.

“So, I’ll get the chair set up, and we’ll transfer you to it. If you can sit up for 10 minutes, then we’ll see what to do next, OK?”

She wheeled a recliner from the corner of the room to directly beside my bed, then said, “OK, I’ll be right back.”

She went out the door, talking to someone in the hall, who joined her coming back into my room.

“Alright, now, let’s see. Can you sit up, in bed, do you think?”

I raised myself up on my elbows instead of replying verbally.

“OK, good. Now, Martha, why don’t you get the bed rail and move the blankets, I’ll get the bag and help him sit all the way up.”

They did so, helping me sit with my feet dangling off the edge of the bed, their hands supporting my back.

“Do you want to try sitting without support for a minute?” she asked.

I nodded, tensing the muscles of my core.

As they removed the support of their hands, I felt myself slump a bit, but managed to stay upright.

“OK, we’re ready. Let’s try getting you to stand,” Martha said.

With their grip on my arms, I planted my feet on the floor, and eased myself off the bed. The pressure against my feet seemed foreign, the ground impossibly cold, hard tiled floor sucking effort from me through them.

I stood like this for only a moment, yet my heart seemed to flutter, my vision going fuzzy and black like the display of a broken computer monitor.

I felt as if I was going to fall, but their hands caught me, placing me in the depths of the recliner, where I huddled, shivering.

One of them put the blanket over my lap, letting me sit thusly.

Martha left, leaving the other in the room, sitting quietly in another chair.

I sat, staring bleakly out across the floor.

So far I had been, and yet so devastatingly far there was to go yet.

Griffin had said, I had been in the battle of the Port of Istinhire. Survived a helicopter explosion from an RPG? I couldn’t remember any of it. And yet…. as I probed it, the blankness seemed to envelop greater reaches of my consciousness.

Why couldn’t I remember? What had happened? Where were my family? What….what was going on, what was going to happen to me, and when was…when was anything, anything I knew going to be where it was before?

I felt my throat close, my face growing hot despite the coldness of the surrounding air, my body tensing, my previously slow breathing growing into a frantic panting. A high pitched noise escaped my lips, which rippled into a pained scowl. Something hot poured down my face.

God, what am I going to do? I can’t even stand up, I realized. I’m alone here. Helpless, and alone. I shuddered, air hissing out as if it could carry away the disgust that had erupted inside me.

The minutes passed in agonizing quiet as the nurse worked on something on her tablet.

Eventually a timer beeped, she stood and said, “OK, well you made it to ten minutes. We’re going to get you back in bed, and talk to the doctors in the morning about maybe using a bedpan instead of the bag.”

I nodded, wordlessly as they maneuvered me back into the bed, the world spinning, careening, as it came crashing, crashing back from the visual blackout of orthostatic hypotension.

Crashing, crashing back, just as reality had come crashing back in on me.

I slept fitfully that night, something deep inside me having awoken earlier in the day that was not so easily settled.

The hours seemed to stretch endless as I’d awaken from a shallow sleep at frequent intervals, fuss with my pillow or stretch a bit and try to go back to sleep.

During one such burst of sleep, everything seemed to go red behind my eyelids, glowing, burning, through my retinas, burning, burning, a liquid fire that coalesced and spread through my veins.

I felt my limbs begin to quiver, pain spreading, burning, overwhelming everything, so that only it remained. My body jumped, twitched, jerked, alarms from the telemetry sounding, footsteps came running. Urgent voices went back and forth making a decision; again someone jabbed a needle into a port, the warmth of something spreading through my bloodstream, and then the red, burning, fire, the fire in my nervous system was overtaken by the quenching, dark, heaviness of sedatives.