CHAPTER 2
You can only spend so much time sleeping, even when you're doped up on morphine. But, I preferred being asleep to being awake. It hurt too much to be awake. I had a respirator tube stuffed down my throat which I hated with a passion. But, the doctor said is was necessary because I couldn't take a deep enough breathe on my own to fill my lungs properly. It just hurt too fucking much. The respirator wasn't much better. The tube in my throat made it sore and irritated, like I had a really bad case of strep throat. It also dried out my mouth, leaving my tongue feeling swollen and my throat parched. Naturally, I couldn't eat or have anything by mouth, including fluids. There was too much danger of my vomiting and ripping apart the doctor's needlepoint. So I was being fed and given fluids through a tube that ran into the back of my right hand, effectively rendering both of my arms immobile.
In the beginning, I didn't give a damn. I was having enough trouble just trying to make it from one minute to the next. I was filled with an irrational fear of being alone. Hutch knew that, and that's why he stayed with me despite the occasional objections from the medical staff. One look in those steely blue eyes, like chips of blue ice, combined with the determined look on Blondie's handsome face and most of them didn't raise a second objection. Plus, I'm sure that cannon Hutch carries helped persuade a lot of them not to push him too far.
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Most of the time, I felt like the doctors had patched me back together with bubble gum and duct tape, with a few strands of barbed wire thrown in for good measure. Everything had been rearranged and pieced together like a puzzle with a few pieces missing. Most of the time, I couldn't even tell anyone how badly I hurt because of that damn tube down my throat. All I could do was whimper like a baby and blink back the tears that gathered in my eyes. Down deep, I was terrified. Terrified of an uncertain future with nothing but pain in sight for weeks, maybe even months. I wondered if I would ever be whole again. Having Hutch at my side helped soothe some of that fear but not all of it. Hutch always seemed to know how I felt and exactly what I needed at any given moment, I guess it's a good thing we have our own little psychic connection going since I couldn't tell anyone what I needed in the beginning. It's really hard to have a positive attitude when you have a tube stuck down your throat so you can breathe, a tube stuck up your nose so they can feed you, IV's lines in both arms, drain tubes stuck here and there, a bag stuck to your belly so you can shit, and a tube jammed up your dick so you can piss. It seemed as if I had tubes coming out or going into every opening on my body and even in some places where there shouldn't have been any openings.
Sleep became a welcome escape, a way to ignore the pain, the fear and the uncertainty that had become my life. But sleep brought me little rest. The slightest movement would send waves of agony washing over me like a thousand knifes cutting through my body, slicing it to ribbons. Other times, my legs would cramp up into hard knots that brought tears to my eyes and an involuntary cry of pain to my lips.
Sometimes, my heart would beat too fast until it felt like it was going to explode in my chest making me hyperventilate. At other times, it would beat so slowly that I felt light headed and out of breath even with the respirator forcing air into my lungs. In the beginning, there seemed to be no middle ground. But, Hutch was always there when I opened my eyes, keeping me safe and watching my back.
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I was beginning to feel like a pin cushion. It seemed like there was always someone coming at me with a needle. My pain meds were injected through my IV line so that wasn't too bad, but those vampires from the lab seen to have a real thing for my blood. They take some from me every day. And it's never just one little stick, it's more like three or four. Believe me, after a while, that really starts to hurt. I feel like telling them to go easy, that I need that blood a lot more than they do and that I've only got so much that I can spare. But somehow, I don't think that would stop them. All the drugs scared me too. I knew I was on a high dosage of morphine and that worried me. I knew how addictive it was. I remembered far too well the hell Hutch went through when some goons involuntarily hooked him on smack. I didn't want to have to deal with withdrawal symptoms farther down the line. I had enough on my plate right now. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
You have no fucking privacy in a hospital, especially in the ICU. Someone is always coming in to take your temperature, check your blood pressure and respirations, change your bandages, or poke at you and they do these things twenty-four hours a day so you never get enough rest.
Then you have the medical students that the doctors bring in to see the 'miracle patient' first hand. They stare at you like you're some kind of bug under a microscope in one of their classrooms. I just want to be left alone for ten minutes. Is that too much to ask?
I'm so sick and tired of everybody telling me what a miracle it is that I'm still alive. I don't feel like any fucking miracle. I feel like a middle aged cop that's been shot full of holes and lived to tell about it. A man whose body has suffered massive damage and isn't bouncing back the way it did when I was twenty. I feel tired and worn out, used up and thrown away. Most days it takes all the energy I have just to open my eyes.
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The nurses are competent and professional. There are a couple of really cute ones on this floor. If I was feeling better, I'd be getting their phone numbers. Blondie isn't even flirting with them, he's too concerned with watching over me. The nurses try to be as gentle as they can with me but it doesn't matter, they still hurt me without meaning to. A lot of the procedures they have to do are invasive and painful. That includes flushing my IV lines so they don't clog up, changing the drainage tubes in my chest, drawing blood, and changing my bandages.
Changing my bandages is a major undertaking that they have to do three times a day, once on each shift. It is so painful that they always have to medicate me first. And even then, I'm usually whimpering in pain with tears in my eyes by the time they're done.
Since some of the surgical incisions still have some drainage, the bandages always stick in some spots and have to be soaked loose with a saline solution. The nurses have to examine each wound and each surgical incision for infection which is excruciatingly painful for me since the injures are still so sensitive and tender. After a dressing change, Hutch often sings to me until I fall asleep. Sometimes, he just holds my hand. I need that physical contact desperately.
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They finally took the respirator tube out of my throat today. Although I'm grateful to finally have it gone, it's not an experience I want to go through again any time soon. The doctor came in and told me to cough and then he pulled out the tube. It hurts and you feel like you're going to start gagging and throw up all over everything and everybody. After it's finally out, it seems to take your brain a couple of minutes to remember how to tell your lungs to breathe. That's scary because for a few seconds you feel like you're suffocating until your brain finally kick starts your lungs. The tube also leaves your throat raw and sore, sometimes it even bleeds temporarily. You can't talk and you can't swallow for days. They let Hutch stay in the room with me when they removed it and I squeezed his hand so tightly that I left bruises.
He didn't say anything but I could see it in his eyes. He felt my pain as acutely as I did. I couldn't talk, even though I wanted to, so I just gave him a feeble smile (that was the best I could manage) and silently mouthed his name. I wish you could have seen Hutch's face when I did that. He looked like he'd just won the lottery. That made coming back from the dead worthwhile. I guess he was scared that my brain might be as scrambled up as my body.
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I had so many different doctors, I couldn't keep track of them all and was always forgetting their names. I had a doctor who monitored my lungs, one who kept an eye on my heart, the surgeon who operated on me who liked to admire his handiwork, a doctor who watched for and treated my various infections, one who monitored my digestive problems, and a doctor who treated the nerve and muscle damage in my chest and left shoulder. Keeping them all straight was enough to make my head spin and then there was the physical therapists, the nurse's aides, the dietician and the hospital shrink. It seemed like they all wanted a piece of me and I didn't have anything left to spare.
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I thought a lot about Pop after I was shot. He was only two years older then me when he was shot and killed. I often wonder what my life would have been like if he had lived. From my own experience, I know that he probably didn't feel any pain at the end. I know I didn't feel anything at first…that came later. When they told me that I died briefly, my one regret was that I didn't see Pop waiting for me.
Getting shot hurts. It hurts like hell and anybody who tries to tell you that it doesn't is flat out lying. When you first get hit, you don't feel much because your body goes numb and shock sets in pretty fast. But after a few minutes, you start to feel it. It feels like someone shoved a red hot poker in your flesh and left it there. You start to get light headed and cold, not to mention sick to your stomach. If you're lucky, you won't puke all over yourself.
I thought a lot about Maw too. I can only imagine how she must have felt when she heard that I had been shot just like Pop. It had to bring back painful memories of the day that she lost Pop. I know that she lived in fear of losing me the same way she did Pop every since the day I pinned on a badge. I can only thank God that she didn't but it was way too close this time.
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I hate having a catheter stuck up my dick. They hurt! My dick feels like its on fire most of the time and I always get an infection from the damned thing. It was almost a month after the shooting before the doctors finally decided I could do without it. The first time I had to take a piss was definitely no picnic. Hutch had to hold the urinal for me and position my dick for me so I wouldn't piss all over the bed and myself. Luckily, he's taken care of me enough in the past when I was sick or hurt that neither one of us was embarrassed when he had to help me with something so intimate. We've learned to laugh off stuff like that over the years.
My plumbing was still messed up and I felt like my bladder was going to burst. After a lot of straining and a few choice words in English, Spanish, Yiddish and Vietnamese, I finally managed to squeeze out enough piss to satisfy the doctors so they wouldn't put the catheter back in.
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Even worse than the catheter was the colostomy bag taped to my lower abdomen. I had to wear it until the injury to my bowel healed. Even after it was finally removed, I still had to take medications to keep my stools soft so I wouldn't have to strain to have a bowel movement. The problem was sometimes the meds made the stools too soft and I had couple of embarrassing accidents. The urge would come on too quickly for me to warn anybody that I needed to use the bed pan. That was both embarrassing and humiliating. Hutch and the nurses pretended not to notice as they cleaned me up.