by Aimee Ross
And then sometime, he was back—the next day? the next hour?—explaining that it was time for me to breathe on my own. The tube going down my throat was coming out.
Wait a second. I hadn’t been breathing on my own? And there’s a tube down my throat? How bad was this?
“I need you to take a deep breath in, Aimee, and then blow out through your mouth,” he explained. “It’s probably going to make you cough. Are you ready?”
I nodded.
I breathed in as much as I could and blew, and he pulled the tube from somewhere deep down my throat. I coughed and then felt a kind of freedom. Breathing on my own again didn’t feel any different, unless I did it too deeply—that hurt. He placed long, skinny tubes into my nostrils and around my ears.
“Oxygen, to help you breathe,” he said.
Something was on my tongue. I could feel it now.
I lifted my hand motioning toward it, and a different voice said, “Don’t talk.”
I kept gesturing.
“Calm down, Aimee. Stop moving. And please don’t try to talk. Calm down.”
They didn’t understand. It was my front tooth. I knew it was.
Finally, a nurse leaned in, and I opened my mouth.
“Oh, well, there’s the tooth you lost,” she said. “That happens.”
Such an offhand, breezy remark about my front tooth, one so vital to my smile. But she didn’t care. It wasn’t important to her.
Why had no one noticed it before now? And how had I not choked on it?
The nurse reached over, picked the tooth off my tongue, and just like that, it was gone. But I couldn’t see what she did with it. I bet she tossed it into the trash can. I bet she even thought, “Welp, she doesn’t need this any longer.”
But it was my tooth, not hers. And she didn’t have the right to do that.
I was pissed.
As soon as she turned her back, I lifted my right arm and stuck up my middle finger. A salute in honor of my front tooth, now gone forever. And I didn’t care who saw.
Immature and meaningless, but it was all I could do. And it was enough.
• • •
Sometime during the middle of the night, when no one had been in my room for a while, I could hear music. Were the nurses playing it at their station to comfort patients?
Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”
Ohio State University band music. The Best Damn Band in the Land. I remembered. My college alma mater.
Now “Purple Rain.” It’s Prince.
The melodies echoed from some peripheral place, looping over and over and over before settling in my brain.
A fuzzy nothingness surrounded me. I felt like people I knew were outside my room wanting to talk to me, staring at me as if I were on display. I didn’t see them, but I thought I heard their voices.
The music eventually faded away to nothing. Time faded away to nothing, too.
Silence.
A nurse visited and told me they hoped to move me out of the ICU soon.
I was in intensive care?
A dog barked outside of my room. A man spoke, probably a fireman or an EMT. I pushed the buzzer. I wanted to pet that dog, feel its warmth.
“Can the dog visit me?” I asked.
There was no dog. There never had been, the nurse said.
“What happened to the music?” I asked.
There was no music; there never had been.
“You’re hallucinating, a side effect of the drug changes in your system,” the nurse explained.
They were weaning me off heavy sedation to painkillers so I could be moved. A good thing, I thought—my body was doing what the doctors hoped—but it also meant being relocated and transferred to another bed.
The new place was much different than before, more cozy: dim lighting, warmth, and a curtain dividing the room.
Several nurses came into the room. Maybe four, maybe five. They gathered round, grasping edges of the sheets or blankets to move my deadweight body. Grunting, struggling, and maneuvering, they lifted me into a new trauma bed. I was attached to so many sensors that even the slightest movement set off a chain reaction of onomatopoeia.
Beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep.
My new roommate, hidden behind that thin patterned material, was not happy with this. I heard great sighs of disgust from her corner.
I faded in and out of a sleep filled with scattered, strange moments and vivid, broken dreams.
The computer in my room turned on, revealing a program that projected over an entire wall. By simply blinking my eyes twice (much like double-clicking a mouse), I could choose a virtual escape that would separate my mind from my body’s trauma. And like the rides at Disney World that sweep you over beaches, cliffs, or rainforests, I sailed through spectacular oceanfront landscapes for a time, comfortable and free, until a notice popped up that in order to continue, I would have to provide my credit card information or be billed.
I worried that the trip my brain had taken was adding another cost to what had to be an already huge medical bill. I also wondered what kind of place I was in. What kind of hospital offered virtual brain escapes?
Later, God came to me in the form of a woman. Ethereal and fairy-like, she was dark-haired and wearing a long, gauzy white dress. She comforted me and then became Clifford the Big Red Dog. Clifford comforted me, too.
The voices of various family members mingled in conversation just outside my room, and I overheard a surprise being organized in the hopes that I was being moved home soon. Home? Did they even know what was wrong with me yet? I was worried, anxious, even in such a dreamlike state. How could I go home when I couldn’t even move my body?
I dreamt of my family leaving secret gifts all over the room for me to take home, much like when Santa visits sleeping children on Christmas Eve. Two new overstuffed armchairs took the place of the hospital’s dismal plastic ones. A shiny, new white fridge sat against the wall. Fluffy, pastel-colored towels were stacked on a table where a beautiful floral arrangement had been placed. There was even a nice set of toiletries left for me at the foot of my bed.
I heard voices of family fighting with nurses about removing the gifts, which nurses said weren’t fair to the other patients. Then I overheard plans for a parade at the hospital in my honor—since there could be no gifts. In my sleepy, dreamlike haze I thought about waking up to my very own parade, and I couldn’t wait.
But I woke up to stark emptiness.
Had I imagined everything? Where was everyone? Why hadn’t they come in to see me?
I heard familiar voices outside the room again. My brother Brian’s wife, Laurie. Mom. Did I hear Connor, too? When would they come in? I thought it had been a week since the accident, and Connor hadn’t come to visit yet. I missed my baby boy.
Just then, my bed began to shake. Someone was underneath it.
“Connor? Is that you? Stop that! Quit hiding and come here. Come see me.”
Connor was playing tricks on me, but I was drowsy and didn’t have the energy for games.
I continued to float in and out of sleep.
February 2010 | Five Months before the Accident
“You must have made up your mind,” Kenny spat at me, his boyish good looks lost in an angry scowl.
He had thrown open the door and stomped into the bedroom where I stood in the adjoining bathroom’s doorway, staring into the mirror, concentrating on tweezing my eyebrows. Jerrica, Natalie, and Connor were just outside, watching TV in the living room.
“What are you talking about?” I asked in a low voice.
The last few weeks had been tense. He knew I wasn’t happy, and I knew I had to do something about it. I turned away from the mirror, took a few steps, and shut the door behind him so the kids didn’t hear.
“You’ve been calling divorce lawyers,” he said, throwing down a phone bill he’d printed at work, detailing calls made from my cell. “So then yeah, you must have made up your mind!”
Ah, the divorce lawyers. I had called only a couple—and within the past two days—trying to find out what the timeline and cost might be. Really, I was just gathering information. I wanted to know what I would be getting into if I decided to proceed.
After eighteen years of marriage, lately we spent more time apart than together. Affection had turned to antagonism, and I had become cynical, angry, sad, and looking for something Kenny wasn’t giving. I was miserable, and I couldn’t imagine he was any happier.
“Well?” he asked. “Aimee?”
This was the moment. The inevitable, monumental moment that I knew had probably been coming. I either told him now, or I continued to live this lie. I breathed in through my nose and held it, steeling myself.
“Okay then, Kenny. I want a divorce.”
Breathe out.
“Well, that’s just fuckin’ great,” he growled.
The words slid out of his mouth and into his T-shirt as he bent over, sitting down on the edge of the bed. He held his head in his hands while I just stood there, allowing what had just come spilling out to sink in.
He pulled his wedding ring from its finger. The triceps of his upper arm clenched tight under the cut-off sleeve of his shirt as he gripped the ring, and then he threw it. Hard. The gold band, no longer a precious metal, bounced off the wall. Clink. I flinched.
“Don’t you love me anymore?”
Tears rolled down his round cheeks, but I might as well have been that wall.
“Yes, I love you,” I said in a quiet voice. “But not the way that I should for a marriage to work.”
I watched him consider this. Resignation.
He didn’t argue. He knew, too. Maybe he even felt the same way.
“You’re telling the fucking kids,” he snarled. “If this is what you want, then you”—he pointed a finger at me—“will tell them.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. He was pinning the end of a twenty-year relationship on me, rather than seeing it as something we were both a part of. It proved what I had felt for a long time: Our marriage was no partnership. And in that moment, I knew he wouldn’t fight for me. I wasn’t sure it would matter if he did.
Defeated, Kenny walked out of the room. I knew he would retreat to the basement where he spent most of his off-work time, escaping to a virtual world where grown men played war games chasing after and shooting each other. I went into the kitchen to busy myself with mindless tasks and wrap my mind around the last half-hour.
There was no relief and no weight lifted. And I had no idea how I should be feeling.
What would happen now?
After a while, he came upstairs, stomped into our bedroom, and shut the door. He was grieving; I was reeling.
I knew the marriage was officially broken.
An hour or so later, I heard the bedroom door’s familiar squeak. All three kids and I were sprawled in different positions and places on the living room’s new brown furniture, still watching TV. Their father burst into the room.
“Your mother has something she wants to tell you,” Kenny said through gritted teeth.
Oh no. Not now.
I wasn’t ready; this wasn’t fair. Especially not right before sending them to bed.
I was appalled. These were his children!
Tears started to fill every one of the kids’ eyes—they knew. There was no use trying to get around it. They were aware of the tension; they heard the fights.
Jerrica, Natalie, and Connor: the three most important people in my life.
I was about to devastate them and destroy our family, taking the blame alone.
In that moment, I hated Kenny. This was my punishment, his way to get back at me, and I would never forgive him for this. My ability to protect my children, to tell them on my terms, was being controlled by his manipulation.
I stood helpless in the middle of the room, warm from the blood flooding the skin of my cheeks and neck. The thumping in my ears, the sound of my beating heart, drowned out the noise of the TV. How could a heart beat when it was breaking?
“Tonight I told your father I wanted a divorce.”
Nine words. Enough to break promises, enough to break a family.
I felt hollow. My heart, crushed in a single life-changing moment, had shattered into countless irretrievable pieces.
That moment disintegrated into a fragmented tableau of several more: Kenny, his face in his hands sobbing, on the couch with a bewildered Connor, also crying. Jerrica in the recliner, Natalie on the loveseat. Both girls looked from me to their father, faces searching for an explanation. Jerrica moved to sit beside Kenny, and he collapsed into her chest, sobbing loudly.
In the blur of that moment, watching my children fall apart before my eyes, I had no idea what to do. I felt like I had said enough, but Kenny wouldn’t speak. He no longer mattered now. In fact, he and his passive-aggressive, childish ass could go to hell. Our children were what mattered, and they needed me.
I sat on the loveseat then, away from him, and wrapped my arm around Natalie. She fell against me, crying hard. No one spoke save the voices of a trashy MTV reality show, while minutes trickled into one another. The clock above the TV marked time, hands ticking along with the intermittent sniffles and broken sobs.
I did not cry. Instead I wondered what tomorrow would be like. If my children would hate me. How I would get through the school day. How Kenny would treat me when he got home from work.
I braced myself when I noticed the crying fading. I had to break this spell.
“It’s time for bed, kids.”
Jerrica, Natalie, and Connor quietly gave us both goodnight hugs and kisses and went to their rooms. I knew they would lie in their beds, still crying, awake for hours, probably angry with me.
This was all my fault, wasn’t it?
Kenny walked into our bedroom and shut the door. After more than twenty years together, I knew what he was thinking.
I hope you’re happy now.
But I wasn’t.
I had just broken the hearts of all the people I loved. I had broken my own.
None of us would ever be the same again.
Trauma Center | Seven Days after the Accident
The gray, gauzy haze finally lifted, along with my eyelids. I was awake.
Mid-morning light streamed through the open blind slats of a window to my right.
Two vinyl chairs sat at the foot of my bed, one brick red, the other drab orange. On the wall behind them, a square whiteboard announced the names of my assigned doctor and nurse in neat, loopy handwriting. Above it, a wall-mounted TV, and to the left, a computer on wheels half-hidden by the thin blue curtain dividing the room. A tray table beside me, another computer on wheels behind my shoulder. To my right, an IV machine.
From my forty-five-degree hospital bed angle, I could see I was neatly tucked into my environment, my body a letter enveloped in the white hospital sheet, a blanket turned down at my waist. My left arm was in a thin blue sling at my side, the other comfortably resting with an IV. An oxygen tube was up my nose, while what seemed like a hundred other tubes were either going into or coming out of my body at various angles.
I felt stiff, statue-like and confined, and when a nurse arrived to check my vitals, I asked if she could remove the covers from my legs. As she peeled the covers down to my ankles, I saw a cast encasing my left leg from the knee down. I slid it out from under the covers to try to lift it, but it was so heavy.
“Could you please pick my leg up and put it on top of the covers?”
“Of course. Your pedicure is gorgeous—very summery,” she s
aid as she gently picked up my heel and set it down.
“Oh, thank you.”
My toenails, a glossy, sparkling fuchsia, peeked out above the edge of the cast. I had polished them the day before dance camp started. Their perfection looked ridiculous now in this sterile, bluish environment, but seeing them somehow made me feel better.
I watched highway traffic edge toward what I recognized as the Cleveland skyline while I lay there, taking in my surroundings.
“Hi, Aimee?” a man in a white coat said as he came from behind the curtain, pushing it aside to make room. He introduced himself as the trauma doctor on rounds that morning.
“I’m here to explain the extent of your injuries, let you know what’s happened to your body.”
I could tell from the sling and cast and scratches that I was pretty beaten up, but I didn’t know how badly.
“Do you remember what happened?” he asked gently.
“Yes, sorta.”
“Your car was T-boned,” he said. He gestured with his hands, placing the fingertips of his right into the palm of his left. “You took the brunt force of the collision, because impact was at the driver’s-side front wheel.
“Both your left ankle and foot are broken. The bones of your midfoot actually punctured your skin when they were displaced.”
So those were the bones I had seen.
He continued, pointing to the top of the cast, “There are three screws here and two wires here holding your foot together now.”
“Your pelvis and tailbone were also fractured. We had to put a screw into your pelvic bone to hold it in place as it heals,” he explained. He lifted my hospital gown a bit and gently turned me to show a small, stitched hole on the back of my left hip where a screw was now holding me together.
Whoa. My pelvis was fractured? Broken? I couldn’t believe it. And at the same time, I wondered what it really meant. How can a person even move with a broken pelvis? Would I be confined to bed?
“You also had another compound fracture in your upper left arm,” the doctor went on. “You can see here”—he pointed to a spot on my upper arm—“where the bone broke the skin.”
