I was asked over and over for my name, if I knew where I was, if I could remember what happened. The nurse had to try three times to get my IV in, but once I was finally hooked up, the steady drip of painkillers went a long way toward helping me communicate. At first I was only able to blurt out the odd word here and there, but as the pain became more manageable I worked my way up to ugly little sentences.
“Thrown.”
“He threw me.”
“The hero threw me.”
“Supercollider. He threw me across the room.”
I repeated it over and over, the simple fact of the cause of my injury, and it made almost everyone who heard my answer grimace and blanch, and change the topic. Only one doctor pursed her lips together and nodded, as though unsurprised. She didn’t look much older than I was, with luminous black skin and long, deft hands. She seemed exhausted but projected an air of utter competence that was incredibly comforting.
“I should have been a doctor,” I drawled. She smiled.
“Maybe. What you do seems dangerous. Might have a longer life expectancy than working with heroes.”
“Wrong side, I’m afraid.”
She shook her head. “Don’t say that too loud or too often.”
“Fair.”
“Explains why you’re in such bad shape, anyway. Before I saw your chart, I assumed you were in a car accident.”
“I feel like I got hit by a semi.”
“Your femur looks like you did.” She was gravely considering some X-rays.
“My leg?”
“Yes. Bones don’t distinguish between trucks and someone who can throw trucks.”
I was fitted with a brace, a grotesquely painful process that made me squeal, even with the drugs. The imaging confirmed what was already apparent from how badly my leg was twisted: that the break was bad and complex. At first, I wasn’t able to process much more than my body’s steady, dreadful bleating there is something wrong with my leg, like an internal siren.
Later, I would become intimately, obsessively acquainted with everything that was happening under my rapidly swelling skin. But at that moment, I couldn’t understand why they didn’t just slap a plaster cast on me and call it a day.
I had broken my wrist once, in middle school. A quick trip to the emergency room and a neon-green cast later, and I was home watching TV and eating a popsicle. I missed a couple of days of school, almost ceremonially; it didn’t even hurt very much, just a deep, weird ache and later the terrible itch of healing. Lying there now, I thought at first they just needed a bigger cast, and soon I’d be home with some Percocet, bingeing on Korean horror films.
“I want a black cast,” I announced to no one in particular, imagining I could pick the color again, like I had as a child.
“It’s a bit more complicated than that,” my doctor said, and I looked up in mild surprise that someone had bothered to answer.
“What?”
“You’re going to have surgery in the morning.”
“On what?”
“Your leg.” I could hear the struggle for patience in her voice.
I stared at her, blank and confused. She tried to smile but managed only a weird tightening of her lips.
Later, a nurse helped clean some of the vomit residue off my neck and chest, and I made a feeble attempt to wipe more of it out of my hair. He also brought a cup of ice chips; I had to keep my stomach empty before going under anesthesia, and I sucked on them fretfully. At least it helped make my sour, acidic mouth feel cleaner even if it couldn’t dispel the unsettled emptiness that had taken the place of hunger.
That night, my blood pressure began to dip. Things began to become vague again, but without the chilly, numbing edge of shock this time. A couple of doctors conferred at the foot of my bed for a moment. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but the hushed urgency of their voices was an almost soothing, slightly distant susurrus.
My eyelids startled open when one of them tapped my good foot to get my attention. My doctor, who somehow seemed both more exhausted and more in command every time I saw her, told me then I needed a transfusion to stay stable enough for surgery. My femoral artery was intact, so I wasn’t going to bleed out, but the leg had shattered down to the marrow, and blood was pooling in the soft tissues of my leg.
I tried to distract myself from how deeply distressing the idea of internal bleeding was by focusing on weird details. I wondered whose blood I was getting. It seemed so intimate and alien—and strange that I would never know whose red and white blood cells were shoring me up, keeping my brain wet enough to function.
What no one tells you about a transfusion is that the blood goes in nearly ice cold. The bag of gore they hook up to you comes straight out of the refrigerator. I expected something hot, arterial, life-affirming, but what hit my body was cold and sluggish. It takes hours to transfuse and I ended up needing two units to keep pace with what I was losing into the sinkhole of my injury. I shook with cold harder than I ever had before in my life, the arm my IV was attached to frozen and livid. I couldn’t get warm, no matter how many thin, terrible blankets the nurses brought me, and I shivered all night.
The next morning, when the anesthesiologist covered my nose and mouth with a mask and told me to count backward from one hundred, I was simply relieved at the prospect of getting some rest and finally feeling warm.
While I was unconscious, surgeons inserted a metal rod into the marrow canal of my femur. The bone—harder than concrete, the thickest and sturdiest in the human body—was in pieces. It was not a clean break; later I would learn the phrase “comminuted fracture” to describe the way shards of bone were left floating in the meat of my leg. The doctors scooped the broken pieces back together and packed them in place, hoping they’d mend as well as possible. They made a second incision in my knee, matching the one at my hip, and attached the rod to my bones at both ends with titanium nails.
Waking from anesthetic isn’t like shaking off sleep. The weight of your unconsciousness has to wear off. It’s a slow swim back to the surface of your mind, a fight against the drag of grogginess. I found myself clinging to uncomfortable little sensations to anchor myself, like the ache from the IV and the terrible cold—which hadn’t, as I’d hoped, gone away—the huge new throb of my leg all the painkillers couldn’t quite wipe out. My skin was clammy and seemed to itch everywhere. In the recovery room, finally being able to fill my mouth with a little cold water was bliss. I made a joke about setting off metal detectors at the airport for the rest of my life. No one laughed.
By that evening I was sitting up, hands curled around a cup of tea (which, if not hot, was at least blessedly warm). My doctor reappeared, bearing the air of someone who’d just showered and changed their clothes in lieu of sleeping.
She showed me new X-rays, the rod and nails showing up crisp and vivid against the ghosts of my bones. “It went well,” she said, satisfied. “It was an ugly break, but surgery went as smooth as it could have. You may be able to put some weight on that leg in a few days.”
That sounded promising. I tried to think of what I knew about breaking a bone. “So, what, in eight weeks I’ll be back to normal, then?”
“Six months.”
“What?”
“I’ve known a break like this to heal in a little less time, and you are young, but considering the type of spiral fracture this was, I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes longer. You’ll be on crutches for most of that, maybe a cane in the last weeks. You’ll get a referral for physio.”