It is interesting what the mind chooses to remember and what it wills itself to forget.
At one moment the hard dirt clods dug into my back and in the next there were two people, male I think, hooking me up to an I.V., I don't even remember the sting of the needle. They asked questions about how to contact parents and without hesitation the numbers of my home flew out of my mouth. Then my grandmother's number. Then some of my friends. I wanted to make sure they had plenty of people to contact.
The most memorable part of the trip was the EMT's refusing me to close my heavy eyes - because it's really all that I wanted.
"Please. Just for a little bit. I'm so tired."
One placed his hand on my arm, "We can't let you fall asleep."
I closed my eyes, "Just a little bit."
Exhaustion wrapped around my body creating a sense of great frustration as these men, horrible they were, to not allow me to just sleep for the tiniest, smallest sliver of time. The entire trip to the hospital was a battle between the EMT's and I: to sleep or not to sleep?! They won. Only because they stalked my attentiveness like vultures, immediately tapping, rubbing, or lightly shaking me awake.
The others in the ambulance were answering the questions of the EMT's with great ease, their voices much brighter and alive.
When we arrived at the hospital the ambulance doors flew open, several staff waiting on the tips of their toes to assist in any way possible. This is what they had been trained for and they wasted no time transporting the victims of the crash through the hospital doors. It was loud, obnoxiously so, and all that noise hurt my head. Beeping of machines, chattering of staff back and forth from one doctor to the next, feet pounding the floor dashing across the hallways to the next room, the cling-clang of medical instruments. It was most irritating and my normal level of irritability shot up about one-thousand points.
They had several staff by my side and then with the count of three lifted me from the ambulance bed to the stiff board that would become my place of misery for the next several hours. Or so it seemed. For the most part, optimism had come to me quite naturally, always finding the humor in each situation, however, the state of my failing body made me nearly mad.
In walked my parents, though I heard their voices before I saw their faces.
"When will they help me?" I nearly begged.
"Soon, honey." If memory serves well, my mom said something close to this.
All that went through my mind was the pain, immense and intensifying with every second that passed. The base of my skull pounded fiercely, twigs sticking in the mess of hair felt as though they shifted until finding the best position to dig into the cranial flesh. I felt my body tensing and begin to writhe. Much like a toddler might squirm on the floor in the middle of the supermarket after being told they can't have any candy, I reacted the same. Body tensed up and then I began to buck on the table, kicking my legs. "Someone help me." I remember screaming, kicking, flailing around as my parents tried to soothe me with words. "No one is helping me. Why aren't they helping me?" I would say it's safe to bet that I had foam seeping from the corner of my mouth at this point.
Then and there I was given another priesthood blessing, by my dad, and then everything calmed inside me.
Some time later they took me back to imaging, still on that blasted board. They put barium in a cup, asked me to drink as much as possible. The chalky substance slid down my throat hitting the stomach like a sack of rocks. The nausea was coming in the middle of the scan. "I feel really sick."
"Just a little longer. We're almost done."
"I can't." The tears welled up. "I'm going to throw-up."
"Okay. Hold on. Just hold on."
The vomit made it partially into the trash can, the rest hit the floor near or on the nurses feet. With a frown I apologized to the girl, "I'm sorry I threw up on you."
"Don't worry."
Immediately post scan they wheeled me back to the ER. The spleen had ruptured on impact. More than half my blood had emptied into the abdominal cavity. On the way from the crash site I had already begun to fail. My body was in bad shape.
It was a scary outcome at this point.
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