Lacunar
10. Collect
The bright light was moved away from Edward's eyes as the doctor thanked him for his patience. She was a new doctor, with wavy black hair and hazel eyes. Edward looked around the hospital room, thinking back to his broken self lying on one of the beds. He wondered what the car crash had looked like.
Had it been gruesome? Deathly?
"It's been a little more than two months now," the doctor said proudly, giving Edward a pearly smile. "The X-rays looked good. You can still use the crutches if you need help moving around. But remember to stretch your leg every day using those techniques."
Edward nodded, feeling great satisfaction in getting his cast removed. Jenks walked into the room, pulling up a swivel chair as the female doctor walked away. He then jumped into the deep end of questions.
"Does your head still hurt?" he asked.
"Sometimes. Near the back," Edward answered.
"Okay, that's normal. Keep taking the medication if the pain perseveres," Jenks replied, continuing to jot down notes.
"Do you think... I'm suppressing certain memories?" Edward asked abruptly.
The pen in the doctor's hand stilled.
He looked up at his patient.
"Well, that depends on many aspects. You don't have Retrograde Amnesia; you happen to remember many things about your childhood and the events scattered throughout your timeline. You're holding onto memories- creating more and more as they come- so Anterograde Amnesia is also not what we're focused on, right now," Jenks said, glancing down at his paper.
"Your blood tests have come out perfectly fine and so have your head X-rays. We'll still be doing tests that are related to thought processing but for the big picture, I think only you will know if there are triggers that might lead to unwanted reminders. Maybe at home or at work or even somewhere else. You should ask your wife as well."
Edward looked down at his hands.
He had asked Bella about all of this, knowing that she knew him much better than himself. But Bella hadn't mentioned anything strange. He'd asked her if there were specific events in his childhood that he could have possibly suppressed, or any wrongdoings that he was shamefully guilty about.
But Bella had replied with the negative.
"You're thinking about Lacunar amnesia, aren't you?" Jenks said quietly, crossing his arms. He knew that amnesia was a tricky thing to explore and to understand. "When we had first checked up on you, you claimed that there were parts of you that weren't fully complete. I'd thought that it was due to your body being under the influence of drugs as well as struggling to repair itself. But now, I think you're on a mission to trace back what had happened prior to your car crash."
"I have read about Lacunar amnesia and it does intrigue me," Edward admitted. "But I feel as if there are bundles of memories that I've hidden away. Perhaps, a single memory isn't the only thing that I've locked up."
"It can very well refer to a collection of isolated events or even people in those happenings. Those memories would have then been lost after you suffered your head injury," Jenks confirmed. "They might've held painful information. That's why your brain chooses not to recall them."
A painful collection of isolated events, Edward thought.
He felt the flame of his optimism flicker out.
.
.
.