Prologue
January 20, 2009
I didn't know where I was or what was happening around me. In addition to making sense of everything, simply opening my eyes seemed like the most difficult task in the world.
Blurry images of the last few hours ran through my mind in quick flashes. One moment I was walking out of the car with my wife by my side, hearing the loud roar and cheer of the people outside. They must have been waiting for our arrival; there were a lot of flashes from their cameras and smartphones. The first thing I registered was my body weakening. I was beginning to pass out from the throbbing pain rushing through me.
Panic set in once I shifted my head to look down. There was blood everywhere—my blood. I quickly realized I was bleeding out. That’s when a rush of people flooded the room, attending to me. Nurses and doctors, I assumed.
The room filled with noise, shouts of “code this” and “code that.”
The one doctor placed their hand on my chest and told me to try and relax and that they were going to take care of me.
One of the nurses had first closed the blinds when she entered the room and then proceeded to close the curtains around my bed. She had unknowingly left a bit of a gap in the curtains of the room I was in and I could see what was going on in the corridors since the door was also slightly opened. It seemed like there were two men in black suits guarding the hallway towards my room at the far end of the passage.
I heard the voice of a man carry through the hall ways of the hospital wing I seemed to be on.
He was extremely emotional and kept telling the men in suits to let him through, and that someone needed him.
One of the men in the black suits just kept extending their hand out, indicating that the man who was shouting at the top of his lungs with smeared blood on his face would not be allowed through.
“Sir if you do not calm down and take a seat, I will be left with no other choice but to detain you myself. No one but doctors, nurses and family members, are allowed to see him right now.”
The highly emotional man didn’t seem to give two shits about the rules and regulations of the hospital. He was either getting in, or going to die trying by the looks of it.
After seeing all of this, I gathered that whoever he was trying to see must be very important, or at least very important to him if he was willing to continue fighting to get through the way he was.
Which then brought me back to the question, what was I doing in this place? What happened for me to end up here and why did my entire body hurt?
I tried to speak out but the nurse put a mask over my face and asked me to try and relax. She told me to take in deep breaths and not speak.
Suddenly a white light was shining brightly above me, it was the last thing I saw before passing out completely.
I had no choice but to trust the doctors and the nurses in the room, and hope that this would all make sense eventually.
