Matt flung his head to the side and ducked, heaved his shoulders forward, and pitched his arms upward which struck a large limb above. The thud he heard was inside his skull. All his senses were instantly focused to the back of his head where the cold steel struck him. All at once, his vision blurred with a stream of blinking red and blue spots. Agonizing pain. Sounds of chaos and a radio blaring. All muffled by a constant ringing from deep inside.
And then…nothing.
23
ICU
She stepped off the elevator into the foyer of the ICU ward. Blinking through the tears that had not stopped since that dreadful cry of Jake on the radio—Jake’s voice still haunted her as he screamed code nine over the air. A dispatcher’s worst nightmare: code nine. That code for the sheriff’s office that an officer is in trouble and needs help like no tomorrow, and she had to be the one working the overtime shift for it.
Alie stood blinking, then finally wiped her eyes so she could see. Two hallways converged in the foyer before her and now there was a decision of which to take. It was too much to handle and her lower lip began to quiver as she teared up again. Biting the inside of her lip in an attempt not to start bawling, Alie looked at the wall, scanning it for directions to room numbers, but the numbers were all just a white blur blending into the brown rectangles they were embossed on.
Wiping her eyes again brought more clarity to directional signs and a map of the ICU ward mounted right before her on the wall opposite of the elevator she just stepped out of. It was easy to berate herself for not seeing the map, she’d been berating and nitpicking every detail in her life since Jake’s call for help.
Why didn’t I see the damn map right in front of me?
Overwhelmed, she buried her face in her hands; her shoulders pitched forward, her hair fell around her head like a canopy, and she began to weep. It was the first chance she had to do so. As her body shook uncontrollably, she looked up slightly through her bangs and saw a box of tissue sitting on a small table below the map.
Weak, sobbing, and shaking, she took half-steps to the chair next to the table. Alie grabbed the tissue box, tucked it into her stomach, plopped down on the chair, and continued to cry. Wiping her eyes, nose, and mouth with several tissues only brought on a new wave of tears. Her hair now entangled with the tissue and a mess on her hands with torn pieces of wet tissue caused her to cry even harder.
Out of nowhere, the internal condemnation that had beat her down since Jake’s voice broke the hum of the dispatch center: You hesitated! She tightened every muscle in anger, squeezing the tissue box, and through clenched teeth, breathed to herself, “Noooooooo!”
She rocked back and forth but couldn’t get Jake’s voice out of her head…
“Code nine! Code nine! Officer down! Matt’s down, I mean 104 is down, unconscious. I need more officers now! Ambushed!” screamed Jake over the radio. His voice had taken on a surreal tone, unlike she had ever heard from him before.
And then the image: sitting and staring at the radio console in disbelief as an icy chill welled up from inside her and flooded her whole being. Jake repeated the plea for help once more before she acted—before she replied to his call for help. Jake’s voice replayed nonstop in her head while she drove to the hospital.
God, you’re an idiot Alie! You hesitated on everything! It’s a wonder he’s not dead!
“Alie?” came a familiar voice.
“Yeah, um…” Alie cleared her throat. “Just a minute, okay?” She frantically tried to collect herself.
“Okay, but no rush, Alie,” replied another familiar voice.
After blowing her nose several times, and attempting to clean off the wet, clingy fragments of tissue paper matted in her hair, she stood up. The box tumbled off her lap, along with white balls of used tissue onto the floor. She looked down at the mess, and her eyes glazed over, and she began to cry again.
She recognized the man that caught her as she lost her balance under the weight of a new wave of sobs: Undersheriff Eldret.
“Hey, it’s gonna be okay,” Eldret tried to reassure her.
“I hesitated,” Alie’s voice quavered. The hug she found herself in by the undersheriff was comforting. “I was so stunned. I just looked at the radio when Jake yelled code nine.”
“It’s okay,” Sheriff Mason said, standing nearby. He held out the box of tissue for her, and Alie pulled a couple out. She fought back the tears but some still escaped past her puffy eyes and down her red checks. “I had such a hard time multi-tasking after that. Even fumbled with the telephone to get a chopper airborne when the paramedics asked for one. I’m so very sorry I hesita—” Alie buried her face in Elbert’s shoulder.
“Alie, it’s not your fault. Those guys out there are responsible for their own safety, and things happen—that is not your fault,” Sheriff Mason told Alie in a soft voice.
“Hey,” Eldret gently pushed her away from him, held her by the shoulders, and looked into her eyes, “we’ll look into everything and figure out what we need to do better next time. Nothing to worry about, okay?”
“I could’ve done better,” Alie argued, her voice still a flutter. “Matt probably would be okay if I’d just did what I always do with code nines. This isn’t my first!” she hung her head and shook it slowly.
“No, he was out cold, Alie,” the sheriff affirmed. “There’s nothing you could’ve done. You got more officers, medical, plus a chopper to the scene for Matt, so good job.”
“How is he now? Paramedics told me over the phone he was in a coma?” her voice trailing up into a question as she wiped her eyes again.
“Well,” the undersheriff began to explain, looking down the hall they had just walked, “Matt’s in a drug-induced coma. Don’t be alarmed when you go in there, okay?”
Alie stared at him without replying.
“He’s a little beat up. They’ve got him on a ventilator due to the coma, there’s a tube coming out of the top of his head to help relieve the pressure and his face is a bit swollen. Eyes are a little swollen too. Doc told me he’s listed as critical but stable.”
“Is he going to be okay?” Alie was biting her bottom lip again.
“Yeah,” the sheriff interrupted Eldret. “He’ll be fine. This is all standard procedure when someone bonks their head as Matt did,” he said with a smile.
Eldret and Mason exchanged glances when Alie looked back up. Both looked tired, and the sheriff especially looked every bit over the 60 years old that he was. Lack of sleep and the never-ending stress of their careers had gouged deep furrows on both their faces, and Alie considered if it was all worth it.
“Do you guys know what happened out there?” Alie’s eyes darted back and forth between them. After she started to follow the protocol for an officer down, somewhere in the confusion, she called to let the command staff know about the incident. She knew they had interviewed Jake shortly after he returned to the office.
“It’s all being investigated right now—”
“Come on Undersheriff!” her voice rose as she stepped back, a fire sparkled in her eyes. “I didn’t get a chance to speak with Jake before you guys let him go home, and no one bothered to come into dispatch to even fill me in afterwards, as usual! I didn’t have much to pass onto Jimmy, who was gracious enough to come in two hours early so I could come down here.”
“Alie, here’s what we know,” stated the sheriff who shrugged at Eldret. “Jake said that the guy’s dog came thru the trees at them. When he called the code nine, he thought they were being ambushed by two people. It was dark, Jake thought he saw a big dark silhouette, followed by a smaller dark—”
Alie stiffened; the small hairs on the back of her neck pricked her. “Did he get a description?” No longer crying, she locked eyes with the sheriff.
“No, they wrestled this guy into the base of a large tree. Matt stood up quickly during the struggle and bashed his head on a low hanging limb. Jake said he thinks the snow from the upper branches brought down some m
ore large limbs on Matt’s head, and the falling limbs made it all look like two people attacking them…” the sheriff paused, looked down, and held out the tissue box again to her. “…that’s when Jake called the code nine. Right afterwards, Jake heard more growling through the limbs and Jake had to put the dog down.”
Alie glared at Sheriff Mason, not moving toward the tissue box. Eldret grabbed a handful of tissues and passed them to her.
“Thanks,” she told the undersheriff as she took the tissues and wiped her eyes again. Alie stood silent, letting their account of Jake’s statement to sink in. Feelings seemed to come to a halt within her. Her tears no longer streamed and the outflow of emotion seemed to have been plugged up by an unseen stopper at the news.
“Jake say anything else?” she questioned while looking down at her hands folding a tissue into small squares.
“No,” the sheriff replied. “The guy they were dealing with, definitely had excited delirium. We won’t know for sure what all he had in his system until a full toxicology comes back, but we do know he had meth and shrooms on board, and he’d been drinking all day. His BAC was at point two-five.”
“They had their hands full out there. They did a good job, and so did you,” the undersheriff reaffirmed.
“And the psycho? Where’s that turd?” Alie asked through pursed lips.
“Right now? Here, shackled to a bed.” Sheriff Mason looked at the undersheriff and nodded. “Suppose we better get.”
Both men gave her a hug and told her again what a good job she had done. Eldret pointed to the hallway on the right and gave her directions to Matt’s room. Easy enough to find as the hallway followed a path of a horseshoe around the ICU ward and exited on the lefthand side of the foyer they stood in.
Alie stood smiling at the two men as the elevator doors closed. Combing out the remaining tissue fragments from the end of her bangs with her fingers and blowing her nose one more time, she looked around for the balls of tissue that had fallen, but assumed the sheriff had cleaned up the mess for her. A small courtesy that brought a smile to her face.
Alie dabbed at the wet marks on her dark-blue polo shirt—making sure not to leave any remains of shredded tissue on the gold trim embossed sheriff’s office logo—and wiped at her blue jeans. Feeling somewhat presentable, she took a deep breath and headed down the hallway.
Rooms lined the corridor on the right with offices and utility closets on the left. After she walked several paces down the corridor, the wall of closed doors on her left ended and a large open nurses’ station came into view. Three nurses busied about, looking at files, talking on the telephone, and one mindlessly staring at a computer screen as she sat eating a small bag of chips.
Directly ahead, as the horseshoe shaped corridor wound it’s way around the large nurses’ station, was room 412—Matt’s room. Four large windows to the left of the door revealed an eerie luminescent green emanating from medical equipment in the darkened room.
Alie stopped abruptly, just before the nurses’ station—concealed by the wall on her left that had not yet dropped away—by a man’s voice who at that moment addressed his listener by name: Mrs. Jameison.
“Yes, ma’am, that is correct: a drug-induced coma. It’s common protocol…” explained a man.
Alie slowly leaned around the corner from where she had stopped walking, and observed the two facing each other on the other side of the nurses’ station, just before the horseshoe hallway fell into the next corridor. A man wearing a white lab coat faced a woman who slowly nodded her head as he spoke.
“…in situations as this. Your husband, Matthew, suffered a TBI—in other words, traumatic brain injury—from the falling tree limbs. We suspect that after being hit on the back of the head he suffered a secondary injury we call coup-contrecoup when he fell; he was probably unconscious before he hit the ground,” the man, presumably the doctor in Alie’s estimation, spoke in a steady, soft tone, with a slight tilt of his head.
So that’s Trish! Alie thought, and then found herself scrutinizing the five-foot, five-inch, brown-haired woman. She doesn’t even look like this has phased her at all. I’m a mess, and she doesn’t look like she’s shed one tear!
Alie stiffened at the thoughts racing through her mind, and stopped leaning around the corner to watch the two speak. She remained silent, standing with her hands folded while eavesdropping on the doctor’s explanation.
“That’s a good question,” replied the doctor; Alie was unable to hear Trish speak.
“Coup-contrecoup is basically when the brain hits the inside of the skull—in this case, after Matt fell to the ground. When the head stops abruptly, the brain is still moving forward and strikes the inside of the skull, then it ricochets backward and hits the opposite side, resulting in damaged tissue.”
Alie’s breath quickened, her fingers tightening around each other as the tears began to well up again, causing the world to blur once more.
“No, ma’am. It’s temporary. The good thing about a drug-induced coma is that it’s completely reversible. We do this to allow the brain to rest. Instead of the brain working on all the bodily functions and being occupied with all that it has to do in an injured state like this, a drug-induced coma shuts down certain areas of the body and allows the brain to rest and heal up so to speak.”
Alie’s eyes widened at the doctor’s description, attempting to hold back more tears and wiping at the ones beginning to stream down her face with shaking fingers.
“It really depends, Mrs. Jameison. We try to bring a patient out of the coma as soon as possible depending on how quick the swelling goes down; it could be a few hours, a couple days, or a few weeks. The internal cranial pressure, due to the swelling of the brain, began to rise fairly rapidly during the CT scan, hence the reason for the ventriculostomy—that’s the relief tube that you saw in the top of Matt’s head. The neurosurgeon put that in place to help drain excess cerebrospinal fluid from Matt’s brain, hence alleviating the cranial pressure to avoid further tissue damage,” the doctor explained, then coughed and cleared his throat.
“Excuse me. The good news is this…” the doctor paused, “The CT scan did not show any herniation or hemorrhaging, which is evident by the fact that there is only clear cerebrospinal fluid draining through the relief tube and so far there has been no bloody discharge. And—”
Trish interrupted the doctor, but her words were indistinct.
“Well, Mrs. Jameison, we don’t know yet. Head injuries are very difficult to predict a long-term outcome as far as recovery goes. It’s really a case-by-case situation. The silver lining in this is that Matthew’s injury is considered moderate—his GCS score on his initial assessment on scene and upon entering the ER was the same: ten—so if the swelling recedes quickly, then we would expect a full recovery.
“But please keep in mind, ma’am, and I don’t want scare you, we just won’t know until the swelling goes down and we can bring him out of the coma. Then, it could take a few days to assess the long term brain damage, if there is any.”
There was a long silence. Alie peered around the corner again without taking a step. Trish, nodding her head, shook the doctor’s hand and said something that was inaudible. The doctor smiled through his closely trimmed gray beard.
Trish turned and disappeared from sight as she walked toward the foyer. The doctor sidestepped to a large whiteboard mounted on the wall and began inspecting it.
Alie took a deep breath, wiped her eyes, and looked up at the numbers above the door just ahead of her on the right, 412. She glanced to her left, found no one looking, and she began to walk toward Matt’s room.
Oh, come on girl. Why on earth do I feel like I’m sneaking into his room?
Alie slowly tiptoed across the threshold of the open doorway, and after entering she quietly slid her feet over the highly polished floor that reflected the lights from the hallway behind her.
She stopped at the foot of the hospital bed and took another deep breath. A nurse was be
hind Matt’s head, tending to an unseen device, which seem to fill the whole space on Alie’s left between the windows and his bed. The nurse looked up at Alie, smiled, and motioned for her to step next to Matt, opposite of all the devices that were beeping and flashing.
Alie returned the smile and nodded to acknowledge her gesture. Matt’s bed was raised slightly at his head and a breathing tube was affixed inside his mouth. It ran a little way over his left shoulder and then split into two flex tubes that reminded her of the silly straws she used to play with as a child. The tubes continued into a machine next to her, which was in the process of emitting a mechanical noise of air being sucked in, with a slight pause before being pushed out again.
Her eyes filled with tears anew while looking at Matt, which gave everything in the room a freakish sheen. The large computer monitor placed on an extension wall-mount next to her right shoulder projected numbers, blips, lines, and jagged patterns that seemed to repeat its incessant broadcast of information. Halfway up the wall, behind Matt’s head, a small white fluorescent beam ascended up to the ceiling from the light fixture ensconced in a wooden frame pointed upward—it created a soft, smooth orb of white light descending over Matt.
Alie grabbed Matt’s hand with both of hers. She blinked again and noticed a clear tube taped on a shaved area on the top of his head. He appeared to be sleeping peacefully. Scrapes and bruises dotted his face and around his eyes. Her bottom lip began to quiver again, followed by an upwelling of tears and emotion.
“Oh Matthew…I…am…” Alie slowly hung and shook her head, her shoulders heaved, “…so…very…sorry.”
Without Alie noticing, the nurse that was on the other side of the bed suddenly stood next to her and put an arm around her shoulders. “There now, my dear, all is well,” the nurse said.
A calm suffused her being and Alie felt a strange relief inside from the words. Alie accepted the tissues handed to her. Wiping at hers eyes, the world fell away as she gazed down at Matt.
Shadows of Reality (The Catharsis Awakening Book 1) Page 17