blossoms. “I don’t want these weeds,” she said as she pelted them into the trash. I loved her anyway. I didn’t know any better.
Love? Yearning? Excitement? Some of us never learned the difference and ended up with exes in emergency rooms in the middle of nights. I blamed the uncle and mother in those memories for not loving me right, but were they any more capable of being someone else back then than I was now?
“Can’t you see I’m skin and bones! Look at my ribs!” he said to the new nurse whom I hadn’t noticed come back into the room.
She swabbed his head with a Q-tip the size of a bunny’s tail.
“We can’t give you anything to eat until we close this up.”
“Close it up! Close it up! Close it up!” He jerked his head back and forth so the nurse could not do her job. She moved swiftly out of the room.
I urged him to cooperate. He ranted that they were all assholes and that the government and hospitals steal money from the taxpayers and don’t serve poor communities.
A slew of people in scrubs charged in all at once. They put his arms in restraints and one poured some type of liquid over the gash in his head. It was clear when it left the container and bright red when it hit the floor.
“It stings!” he hollered.
“Mr. Ferson, we’re going to stitch up that head wound. We can’t give you a general pain killer because you can’t tell us what you have in your system. We’ll give you a local anesthetic, but it’s going to hurt a bit.” The doctor said this less as an apology and more as if he were passing a just sentence.
“Then are you going to give me something to eat?” he asked.
One of the others pulled out a syringe. I asked if I should leave, but they said I could stay, probably because they preferred not to deal with him alone. Though he was rib-counting thin, his cut biceps protruded out of the faded blue and white hospital gown, and he was scowling at each of them in turn.
A gallon of redness had already splashed onto the bare floor. The one pouring liquid over his head began to work the clots at the edge of the wound with a gloved finger.
His face puckered, and he began to holler a deep “aaaah, aaaah, aaaah.”
I wished they had told me to leave. I held his hand and repeated that he would be fine and that it would all be over soon.
The doctor made his way behind him and started pushing a stitching needle through the open flap of skin.
He no longer yelled about chips and sandwiches. His sounds were reduced to a continual low moan, “oooh, oooh, oooh.”