by Roslyn Bane
Nancy dragged her teeth over her bottom lip and glanced at Jim. “You’re not getting rid of us, Sam. No matter how much you push. No matter what you think you look like. You’re our daughter, and we love you. This is what parents should do for their kids.”
“I’m scared.”
Nancy wrapped Sam in her arms and held on when Sam finally let go and cried. After a few minutes, she calmed. The next few hours were spent sharing stories about the family and playing cards. They promised to return later after her next therapy session.
Chapter Fifteen
“HOLY SHIT! WHAT THE hell is that? Where the hell is the rest of your tit? God! I…I can’t look at that. Cover it up. I thought you had a little wound.”
Kris winced as if struck. Her cheeks grew hot, and her eyes brimmed with tears that threatened to overflow. “Shelly,” Kris whispered, “I told you I lost my breast.”
“I didn’t think you meant the entire thing. How the hell are they going to fix that? And when?”
With her hand trembling Kris lifted the gown to cover herself. The pounding in her head started immediately, and she swallowed hard against the rage bubbling up. She bit her lip hard to keep from crying. Unable to hold her anger in, she snapped out, “For God’s sake, Shelly! Keep your voice down. You think this is disgusting?”
Kris ground her teeth together. “The graft has to heal before they can do anything. The muscle underneath is healing too. It’s probably going to be about a year.”
“What?”
“It is done in stages. I can’t explain it to you right now. Do you want to know how my arm is doing?”
“It looks fine except for those scars.”
“I still can’t move my fingers.”
“Still? Why is it taking so long? Are you sure these docs know what they’re doing? I mean how often do they treat female chest injuries?”
“They know what they’re doing, Shelly.” Kris rubbed her thigh, soothing the buzzing of the new skin.
“Why are you rubbing at your leg?”
“It itches. From where they took the graft.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They took the skin from my leg to cover my chest, as the new skin grows back it itches. Have you not been paying attention this week?”
“How many scars do you have?”
“Does it matter?” she said through clenched teeth.
“It does.”
Kris sat silently. What the hell? You’re rejecting me? All this time and… “You need to go, Shelly. I’m tired, and I need to think.” She grabbed the buzzer and rang the call bell for the nurse.
The speed of the nurse’s appearance caused Kris to blink. “What can I do for you, Commander?”
“I’m tired. Can you show my guest out?”
The nurse looked over at Shelly and back at Kris, “Sure thing. Come on, miss, I’ll walk you out.”
Kris sat rigid and looked away. Her jaw clenched tight as Shelly left without a word.
***
“Good evening everyone. I’m Tom Reider, and I’m your facilitator today. I had twenty years on active duty, Marine infantry and am here today to let you know it is okay to be mad. It’s okay to be scared, and it is okay to feel lost. If you want to talk today about what you’re thinking and feeling, great. Feel free to share. If you want to sit and listen, that’s fine too.”
Sam sat in the room, her leg bouncing rapidly, unable to stop it for more than a few seconds. Although I could get up and pace, it would only draw attention to me. Besides pacing wouldn’t be as satisfying as it used to be. Soon my missing foot will start to itch, and my leg will throb. My leg is probably out there somewhere bouncing, tangled in machinery. Stop it. Get it together. This isn’t normal. Am I going crazy? Pay attention, see how the guys talk about it. Maybe they do the same.
She looked around at the close to forty people in the room. Marines, sailors, men and a few women, with missing limbs, deformed jaws, bandaged heads. Some stared blankly ahead, others talked incessantly. Good God! The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been going on since two thousand two. Some of these old guys have probably seen action in the first Gulf War.
Sam ran her hand across her clenched and rigid stomach muscle as her eyes filled. She lowered her head and stared at the floor willing the tears not to fall. After several minutes, Sam looked up and noticed a few people now mingled in groups. She had seen them at physical therapy and knew they had been back longer than she had. She was about to get up when she heard a voice next to her.
“Hi, Major. How are you doing?”
Sam looked up to see the facilitator watching her. “I’m fine, sir.”
“Uh-uh. It’s Tom now. Besides you outrank me, Major. You look like you’re feeling a little nauseous.”
“I am. It hit me all of a sudden. It must have been something I ate. I should probably go back to my room.” She leaned forward to pick up her crutches but stopped when he put a hand on her shoulder.
“It probably was something you ate. Probably a couple hundred MRE’s and a couple pounds of Afghanistan sand. How did you lose your leg?” Sam jerked with the directness of the question. He smiled. “I tend to be direct, Major. No time for bullshit in this world. You can choose not to tell me.”
“No, its fine. My chopper was shot down. I was pinned in the wreckage. Lost my leg.” She lowered her head, cleared her throat. “Lost half my crew.”
“That’s rough. Do you feel like you did something wrong?”
“What? No. No. I did everything I could to get it down safely. We lost the tail rotor and ended up coming down on the side of a mountain. We rolled a few times.”
“You’re damn lucky any of you made it out at all. What’s your bird?”
“CH53E.”
“Super stallion. That’s a big ass bird.”
Sam smiled slightly. “That it is.”
“How’s your rehab going?”
“Good. They took a few more inches off a week ago. That set me back.”
“You have any questions you haven’t asked your medical team?”
“Ah, well, yes.” She looked at him and then toward a group of marines with their prosthesis on.
“Ask away.”
“I…”
“It’s confidential, Major. Unless you tell me something that makes me think you would endanger yourself.”
“No. No, nothing like that. I was wondering, is it normal to think of my leg as having its own feelings.” He gave a quizzical expression. “Sometimes when my foot is hurting I wonder if it is laying out there in the wreckage and wondering where the hell the rest of me is? And I wonder am I losing my fucking, uh, excuse me, if I’m losing my mind.”
He laughed, looked across the room, “Frank! Come over here and talk to the Major.”
A huge man, with the build of a linebacker, walked over on two prosthetic legs, one above the knee, one below. His hair was buzz cut so close it looked like he had a five o’clock shadow on his head.
“Major wants to know about her leg missing her.”
“Thinking about what your leg is feeling, Major? Yeah, it’s normal. It’s been six months for me and talking with other vets helps me deal with things, so I still come in. But to answer your question, yes, there are still times it happens. It’s a strange thought, although most of us who’ve lost a limb have it. It’s common while you have the phantom pain. I know my legs aren’t feeling anything. You know your leg isn’t feeling anything. As long as you don’t really think that your leg is out there alive, you are sane as anyone else.”
They spoke for several more minutes, and several others joined their group. They brought over bottles of juice and plates of fruit slices, and they shared their experiences. A couple hours later, the session ended, and Sam whistled as she headed toward her room. She stopped to chat with the nurses and shared a joke with them, before going to her room. She smiled as she changed into her pajamas, I’m not going crazy.
She pulled out a novel and started r
eading. A half hour later her eyes grew heavy, and her thoughts drifted. The book fell from her hand. How many people had passed through this same hallway? This same hospital? They’re bodies broken. Probably more than a few with shattered minds too. How many years had these Middle Eastern conflicts been going on? Tom had spent virtually his entire career in the middle east. How much blood had been spilled? And for what?
***
The distinctive thwack, thwack, thwack of the rotor blades echoed in the moonless night sky. Scanning the instrument panel, she ensured everything was operating normally. The crew was subdued in the back. The quiet was justified because they were carrying the remains of several coalition forces. From the few words that were spoken, she knew that her crew was performing their checks and lookouts. Her copilot was looking at map coordinates and gave her updates as needed. Her gaze returned to outside.
Suddenly a bright light rocketed toward them, Sam called out, but the big helo shook with the impact. The sickening sound of metal tearing overpowered the sound of the engines failing and grinding. The smell of fuel and hydraulic fluid saturated the hot, dry air. Working together her crew shouted out instructions as the helo dropped toward the ground. The altimeter spun crazily four thousand, three thousand, two thousand, one thousand, five hundred. The voices of her crew shouting rung in her ears, one hundred. Sam braced for impact and hollered.
Sam jerked up in bed, drenched in sweat and shaking. Reaching up she turned on the light above her. Raising the head of the bed higher, she worked to control her breathing and slow her heart rate. Deep breaths in through the mouth, hold, and exhale through the mouth and nose. Over and over she repeated it until slowly she calmed. She ran her hand through her sweat soaked hair and shivered. She grabbed the water cup on the hospital tray and drank greedily, washing the dust of the desert from her parched throat. After a few minutes, she rang the call bell for the nurse.
“Can I help you, Major?” The nurse asked as she entered the room.
“I need to get up.”
“Is something wrong?”
“I need to get up and walk around for a little while.”
“Okay, Major. Can you wait for a minute while I get a corpsman to go with you? Do you want new pajamas? Looks like you sweated through those. Are you feeling feverish?”
“No. It was just a dream.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No, I want to walk.”
Chapter Sixteen
SAM SAT IN SILENCE staring at the wall above the psychologist’s head. Leave me alone. I don’t want to talk to you.
“Major, how are you feeling?”
“Irritable. I’m not in the mood to talk right now.”
“Your medical team wanted me to stop by and speak with you. They said you had a rough day, with some setbacks in therapy. And you didn’t eat anything at lunch.”
“I usually don’t eat if I’m irritated. So, don’t waste your time telling me I need the food so I can heal faster.”
“I won’t. You’ll eat if you’re hungry. Tell me what’s bothering you, Sam. I’ve only known you for a few weeks, and this is unusual.”
Sam crutched over to the window and stared outside. “I feel like I’m going to explode. And I don’t think you’re ready for that. It’s going to make a hell of a mess.”
“I’m not afraid of that.”
“I am!”
“What are you feeling, Sam? Tell me.”
Silence held in the air and Sam set her jaw, her muscles tensed before she finally exploded, “This sucks! I hate being an amputee, I want my life back! I want to be able to go to work every day. I don’t want to have to retrain and start over in some new career. I have a career! One I’m damn good at.”
“I am mad. I am pissed. I look out the window and see people passing by, walking, running, laughing, playing…taking their life for granted, and I am stuck inside wondering if I’ll ever walk again. Will I be able to return to my home or will I be stuck in some little handicapped apartment trying to scrape by on disability pay?”
Sam pressed her head against the window frame, pausing for a second before turning back around. “I feel useless because I am stuck in a wheelchair, or on these crutches. I am stuck in this room, and I feel…”
“Feel what?”
“Such hopelessness.” She didn’t cry, she shouted because it was anger, rage that consumed her. She placed her hand on her heart and pressed hard. “God, I hate this.” She sat down in a chair, letting her crutches fall to the floor. Her hands balled into fists that she pressed against the side of her head. “Why couldn’t I have died with my crew?” Sam grabbed a stress ball off the table and clenched it. Her knuckles turned white, and her fingers throbbed as she squeezed it repeatedly. The cords of her neck stood out, and she bounced her knee in a staccato rhythm “It’s not right that I lived.”
“Sam, this is all new to you. You’ll have days like this where you ask, ‘Why me?’ You have to push through a little every day. A little more and a little more until the bad days become fewer and the good days increase. You can do this, but it’s going to take time.”
“The good news is once you get fitted for a prosthetic, and you learn how to walk again, you’ll start to feel like you have more control over your life. What you’re feeling is common especially in the beginning. And that includes questioning why you survived, and your crew didn’t. I have no answer for that other than it wasn’t your time. Sam, I have to ask, are you thinking about hurting yourself?”
Sam glanced up at her counselor.
“Major Davies, are you thinking about harming yourself?”
“God no. No, I would never. No, I have no intention of killing myself. That would be throwing my life away. That would hardly be fair to all the ones that didn’t come back. I want to visit the families of my men. I need to see how they’re doing. And I want to apologize.”
“Apologize?”
“I was responsible for getting them back safely. That didn’t happen.”
“I hear that often. I understand the sentiment. Still, you must realize that you were not responsible for the accident. You were shot down and did your best in a difficult situation. And though you lost some of your crew, half of your crew survived. I want you to remember that too.”
They sat quietly for several minutes. “This whole thing is hard to accept. I’m thirty-one years old for God’s sake; I was supposed to have a good and productive life.”
“Sam, you will have a good and productive life. And acceptance is often confused with the notion of being ‘all right’ or ‘okay’ with what has happened. Allow yourself time to feel sorry for yourself, to feel anger, to feel whatever you need to feel. Don’t try to suppress your emotions. If you need to, take fifteen minutes, or longer, and allow yourself to feel. There is nothing wrong with what you’re feeling. In fact, I would be more than a little worried if you didn’t feel this way.”
Sam grabbed the crutches and paced around the room. “This is normal? This rage, this anger I have inside? It…it surges up out of nowhere and it…it…”
“What’s it do, Sam?”
“It takes control. It takes me over; it barges into everything. It scares me. What if I snap? What if I go berserk?”
“Confusion, rage, and fear are part of the readjustment process for anyone returning from a war zone.”
“It is?”
“Yes. You are also recovering from a serious injury. Do you want to talk about this more?”
“No. I need to do something. I’m tired of staying in the room.”
“Good. You should head down to the activity room tonight. Get out and socialize a little. You don’t have to stay long.”
“Maybe. Right now I want to see if I can get something to eat. I’m sort of hungry.”
“I’ll let them know.”
“Thanks. Have a good night.”
***
Sam peeked out of her door and looked at the nursing station. Two nurses were looking down at
something on the desk while another was entering a room. Now’s your chance. Move fast. Please don’t squeak. Great the couch is still near the window. Perfect. Sam lay down and pushed her crutches under the seat. She looked out the window at the nearby highway. Lots of traffic still. Not as bad as it will be in a few more hours. Cars are still backed up at the light cycles. Back home the lights would have switched over to flashing by now. More of a friendly reminder to pay attention, not to actually make you stop and wait.
Sam turned on her side and tucked an arm under her head. She vacantly looked out until movement caught her eye. Police helicopter. Where’s he going in a hurry? Oh, turning back. Searchlights on now. Who you looking for? What did they do? There we go. Police cars too. Time is short buddy, they’re gonna get you now.
The helicopter circled around again. Am I going to fly again? I wonder how the squadron is doing. They have six more months. Hope they’re safe. Don’t want to lose anyone else. She continued to watch the helicopter move back and forth across the sky. Unaware of the movement, her hands twitched as she worked imaginary controls. Her knees flexed slightly as she pressed on the rudder pedals. I should call Lauren, maybe tomorrow. I wonder if she still runs at night? I want to go out and smell the night air. I bet it smells green and damp. The air in the spring feels different. There’s coolness to it, but the pockets of warmth off the ground let you believe that the threat of severe cold is over. Birds will chirp well before the sunrise and rabbits will nibble the fresh green shoots. I bet Nan lost all her daffodils to the rabbits again. Sam blinked slowly and sighed.
“Major, what are you doing out here?” a female voice called from above her.
The only thing that saved her from flipping off the couch was that she grabbed the back of the seat to keep herself from falling. “I couldn’t sleep. I came for a walk.” She sat up slowly and reached for the crutches.
“Well, it would be a lot more restful for you if you were in your bed. Come on let’s get you back in your room.”
Sam grumbled as she stood up. “It was only a few minutes.”
