An Arm and a Leg

Chapter 1Large flakes of frozen precipitation appeared pink swirling in the red strobe atop the ambulance roof. Winter in the big city could be pretty, unless one was staring up at it from flat out down on cold, slushy black pavement. “Can you tell us what happened?” Two EMTs tended to my lower half. Each touch made something hurt, and every time I reached up to swipe at my glasses, a jolt of deep, searing pain ran down my whole left side. “Ow.” Every time. “I thought jogging in the snow would be fun,” I said. “How’d that work out for you?” The male attendant had seemed a little grouchy from the start. “You tell me.” He did. “I don’t think you’ll be running for a while.” “You fell down the stairs?” “Yup,” I told the woman bundled up against the chill that was biting me every place on my body that didn’t burn like fire. “Every one. First foot out the door and down I went.” The eventual bruise on my ass would be nothing compared to the one to my ego. “Yikes.” With another pass at my glasses, I was able to catch her turning back from a quick glance toward the steep flight of forty-six metal steps that went up the side of my apartment building. “Exercise will kill you,” Grouchy But Sexy First Responder Dude muttered. “He’s not going to die,” his partner promised. “You’re not,” she assured me. “Not even of hypothermia?” I wanted to ask. “Do you know what year it is?” “Um, 2018?” “Try not to move.” That was a hard ask, when my vision was completely obscured every few seconds and her partner was so cute. “Sorry.” Not being able to see only added to my anxiety, which, though it did have its benefits as a distraction from the agony I was in, was rather intense at the moment. “For your own good,” the female of the duo said. “Do you know the whole date?” “January…something…2018. Just after New Year’s.” “Close enough.” City Ambulance Techs was abbreviated on their official, toasty-looking bomber jackets. The CATs had been pawing me a while, pulling at my jacket, the sweatshirt beneath it, and the running pants that weren’t very warm to begin with, all in an effort to assess my injuries. Wet fabric on wet skin with more wetness below me and some falling from the sky resulted in chattering teeth. “We’ll get you a blanket in a second. What’s your name?” The female EMT had asked that already. This time, it was likely her idea of a distraction, or possibly a test. I’d been almost truthful regarding how many times I’d banged my head whilst tumbling down all those steps, like an out of control six-foot-two Slinky. “Russel Aaron Spears, like Britney, but I can’t dance.” “You’re cute.” She brushed off my lenses for me with her neon orange glove. I wasn’t. “What’s your name?” I figured I’d answered enough questions to get away with asking one or two. “Brenda. This is Mark.” “What’s up?” he asked. “Me pretty soon?” I tried to put the better of my two feet flat on the pavement. “Ow.” “Yeah. Not happening,” Mark said. “No dancing, no standing no walking, no jogging.” I’d tried to stand before, right after the fall. “Fuck.” I hoped cursing was allowed. I could still do that, and it didn’t even hurt. “Pain is good right now,” Mark told me. “Just the leg, or so it seems. Could have been worse.” “Yeah.” I shivered. “Let’s get him out of here,” Brenda said. “It’s cold.” That was an understatement. Alexa was calling it frigid. “We’ll be taking you over to Mercy, Russel. Is there anyone you’d like us to call to meet you there?” The worst part of the whole ordeal thus far, other than the pain, was the seemingly endless stretch of time I’d spent lying all by myself. My city wasn’t the one that never slept. Everyone else in my building was off in dreamland, and the streets were empty. Staring up into a pitch black sky while being pelted by soggy, cold confetti, I felt a kinship with that Life Alert lady. Falling and not being able to get up was no joke, even at just twenty-eight. Thank goodness I’d had my phone, which now had a large crack down the whole length of the screen. “Where are your gloves?” Brenda’s thoughts were apparently racing, too. “I tend to lose them. Mostly just the right one.” “‘Cause you can’t stay off your phone.” Mark was right. The tip of my finger had finally stopped bleeding from when I’d dialed 911, at least. The blood coursing through me had probably frozen, like the water in the pipes down in the basement the other night. “No. I have no one,” I told Brenda. I lived alone. I ran alone, always before dawn, the middle of the night to normal people. It was common practice, that and avoiding those normal people even during daylight hours, all people, really, normal or otherwise. My shift at the supermarket started at six. A one-hour run, thirty minutes with weights, and then a shower and breakfast before walking over to the bus depot where I caught a ride to work to stock produce. That was my routine. “No family?” Brenda did most of the talking. “No significant other still snuggled under the covers?” My family was a few hundred miles away, my significant other nonexistent. “Nope.” I was going to have to call my boss at the supermarket. He was cool. “Will I be able to go to work later?” I realized I was asking the wrong person. “That’s up to the doctors.” Mark confirmed it. “It looks like you take good care of yourself.” “Yeah.” I turned away from Brenda’s smile. She wasn’t flirting. Despite my body—my muscles, my obsessive workouts and counting every calorie I took in—I wasn’t the kind of guy people flirted with. “That’ll help in your recovery.” It already had once. * * * * The breeze created as I was rushed in from outside Mercy Hospital and through their Emergency Department to a cubicle chilled me to my bruised and broken bones. “Hey, there.” My teeth literally chattered as the nurse—”I’m Carlton”—pulled back the four blankets Brenda and Mark had put on as soon as they departed. “Let’s get you out of these wet clothes.” “Hey, Carlton. I’m Russel.” “We’re gonna get you in a dry gown, Russel, okay?” “Yeah.” “Russel…Russ…Rusty?” He took my glasses off, dried them with a tissue from the box on a nearby tray table, and then put them back on me. “Wet, foggy glasses would drive me nuts.” “Thank you. It was, and most people go with Russel.” “Then Russel it is.” Now that I could see Carlton, I was careful not to make eye contact. My left foot already bare, he removed my right Nike. “We’ll put this with the other one.” He held up a large plastic bag to show me where its mate had ended up. “Good deal.” “So, I’m going to get rather intimate with you here, Russel. We have to strip you down to warm you up, okay?” I looked at the wall, the ceiling, Carlton’s crotch, the ceiling again. “Okay.” “I’ll try not to hurt you, but it’s gonna.” “Yeah.” It did, every yank of my jacket and tug of my shirt, both of which wanted to cling to me and my goosebumps. Even the snip of the scissors up the leg of my pants made me grimace. “There’s no other way to get these off. Do you sew?” I smiled, though I aimed it at the wall, not Carlton. “I do not. Maybe duct tape or Velcro.” “Magic Mike these suckers.” He draped the blanket back over my lower extremities after gently tugging the second half of my Champion brand athletic wear from under my damp butt. The way they tore away in two did remind me of male strippers. I hummed a little “Pony,” though I couldn’t recall if any of the guys in that movie yanked off tear-away pants when dancing to that song. Either way, it made Carlton chuckle. Scissors back in hand, he went at my Fruit of the Looms. Despite the throbbing above and below the knee and in my lower back, I had a momentary fantasy that Carlton was undressing me for pleasure, not just work. It had been a while. Still, I felt rather pathetic for going there and reminded myself Carlton likely saw dozens of bodies a day. Mine would mean nothing to him. He probably saw hundreds of faces, too, and would no doubt do his best to quickly forget the one still turned away from his. “Doing okay, Russel?” “As good as a wet, naked guy with a busted leg can, I suppose.” “We’ll deal with naked first.” The quick burst of clean laundry smell that came wafting my way when Carlton shook open a neatly folded gown was nice, too. “I’m gonna have to undo some of these snaps at the shoulder, here,” he said. “You’re pretty swole, dude.” I smiled again but quickly covered it with my hand, my gaze drawn to his friendly face, despite my self-consciousness. “Ow.” “Something’s coming for the pain. Ibuprofen, until we get you all checked out.” “Thanks.” “No problem.” Despite my muscles, Carlton got the gown around me quite easily. He swapped out the EMTs’ blankets for new ones and tucked them around me. “Better?” “Better. You’re an angel. Thank you.” Carlton shimmied. “On a busy night, it’s compliments like that that make me wanna shake my wing feathers.” He headed for the doorway, where no actual door existed. “The doctor will be in shortly. Try to relax. We can get you something for that, too, maybe. Holler if you need anything.” Relaxation wasn’t in the cards. The mention of something to help me achieve it actually made things worse. * * * * Tick tock, tick tock. Shortly meant different things to different people, it seemed. Twenty minutes passed. I watched the second hand count off four hundred and eighty of them for the last eight. Carlton hadn’t handed me the remote and bed control. I could see it on the table with the Kleenex box and some cotton balls he’d pulled from his pocket. TV would have maybe gotten my mind off the pain. I tried to find him and his canary yellow sneakers and light turquoise scrubs in all the commotion out in the hallway, but he never really stayed in one place very long. I understood. The joint was jumping, to quote Fats Waller. Beyond the glass wall that separated me from a beehive of noise, swiftly moving shapes, and soft hurried footsteps, voices spoke over one another. I’d have sworn I heard my name once or twice, but no one came in for thirty-six whole minutes. “Mr. Spears.” At minute thirty-seven, someone did. “Huh?” My face felt wet again. Not snow. Drool. I’d drifted off, for three whole sweeps of the second hand. “Hi.” I looked at her barely a moment. Most of the people out on the floor wore plain blue scrubs. A few of the nurses had cartoon characters on their tops, though. I saw Tweety Bird, Snoopy, and a red creature I thought might be Elmo, until I realized it was just some red teddy bear. The woman at my bedside wore street clothes, maybe church clothes, a skirt, a cardigan, and pearls. “I just have a few papers we need you to sign.” She passed me a clipboard with a pen attached. “The first one gives us permission to treat you, and the other lets us bill your insurance.” “Okay.” “You’re still with MVP?” “Yeah. No.” I had been, a few years prior, the last time I’d been hospitalized, back when Obamacare was a thing business owners tried to work with, before some took advantage of the permission they’d been given from the government to work around it. “Something else. I forget the name.” “Do you have a card?” “I wasn’t carrying my wallet.” “Ah. We’ll worry about that later.” She was friendly enough, even if she hadn’t bothered with an introduction. I was certain she was fighting a scowl regarding the no insurance card thing, though, or maybe she fought to hide her disdain because she knew about my last trip to Mercy Hospital. Was I still in the red regarding that? From eight years ago? It was possible. Medical bill deadbeats likely didn’t sit well with her. “Sorry.” I signed my John Hancock with a flourish and thought about the bleeding gash in my head and busted nose from that night. “Don’t worry about it. And the date.” A blank stare brought pity and some coaching. “January 3, twenty…” “It’s 2018.” I tapped my temple with her pen, right at the biggest scar. Crap. I doubted she’d have missed it, even without me drawing attention right there, unless she’d been fixated on all of the smaller ones. “I got that part.” “Thank you.” The still unidentified woman took back her clipboard with the least amount of smiling one could pull off without frowning. “Feel better.” Her words came off insincere, too. “Thanks.” Left alone with my thoughts again, two were most prevalent: Ouch with every breath and How much is all this going to cost? The blips from my heart monitor reminded me of the ding at the gas pump. One cent, two, three, ten, ninety-nine, a dollar. The Fresh Foods head honchos at corporate made sure we were all kept just under forty hours a week, which meant they didn’t have to pay for our medical insurance. I paid for my own, and the coverage was crap, the copayments the highest there were to keep the premium down. Beyond vanity, I’d always tried to stay relatively healthy, at least over the past few years. I ate a lot of fruits and vegetables. The slightly damaged or “unsightly” pickings I got to take home at the end of the workday were appreciated. At the moment, however, I’d have given up free fennel fronds and gratis grapefruit for the security of my old MVP coverage. Running cost nothing. That was good. It was exercise, therapy, a necessary distraction, and a reason to get out of bed. Looking forward to not being able to do it was already troubling. The irony that my need to stay physically and mentally fit put me in the hospital was not lost on me, though. * * * * My ruminations and the rest of Act 2 from Ain’t Misbehavin’ I’d been performing in my mind were eventually interrupted by an eruption of chaos just down the corridor. “Incoming!” It started with someone hollering. Then, jumbled speaking reached a crescendo and slowly faded as several pairs of squeaky comfortable shoes rushed toward the ER entrance. “Cubicle 2-B’s open.” Carlton said that. The whoosh of the parting glass door and the sound of ambulance stretcher wheels bumping over the threshold were familiar. The memory brought yet another jolt of pain no one had yet brought anything to curb. I couldn’t help but consider the notion that the lack of attention was due to my outstanding debt. “Twenty-five-year-old male,” a new masculine voice said. “Hit and run. Victim nonresponsive.” “Hey, there.” Carlton’s voice was soothing and calm, friendly and caring. “Do you know where you are?” The chaos was coming my way. “I’m Carlton.” The insurance lady could take a page from his book. “You’re in the hospital.” Now, they were right beside me, Carlton’s yellow shoes and the bottom of the stretcher carrying the guy who’d been hit. “How you doing, Russel?” “I’m okay.” That was all I could see looking down, because of the big beige curtain between us. “We haven’t forgotten you,” Carlton said. “We’re short staffed and overcrowded.” Aww. “No worries.” Now, I felt poor, sore, and guilty. Every once in a while, the curtain would move, when someone bumped it with an elbow or a backside. “Can you tell me your name?” I heard. Unfortunately, the unresponsive guy remained so. “It’s okay,” Carlton told him. “It’ll come.” Several more shadows appeared, moving about against the yards and yards of opaque fabric hanging with rings on a track at the ceiling. I wondered if one of the silhouettes was the insurance billing lady. Maybe she’d take the poor guy by the wrist to make him scratch out an X on the proper line. “ID says Finnius Shay,” a voice not belonging to Carlton shared. “F-i-n-n-e-u-s S-h-e-a.” I’d spelled it wrong in my head, first name and last. “Finneus…that’s a name you don’t hear every day,” Carlton said. “A witness says a snowplow mowed him down on his bike.” The other dude’s words made me gasp. “Russel?” “Is he okay?” I asked Carlton. “We’re doing our best,” he promised. “Bike looks like a pretzel,” I heard above the tearing of paper packaging, the clatter of metal, the scuffle of feet, and never ending movement. “Guy’s lucky to be alive…if he is alive.” There was no way not to listen. “We’re gonna need you to wake up for us,” Carlton said. Something came sliding under the curtain then, something big and black. I tried to shift to the side of the bed for a better look, which resulted in another gasp, this one stifled, and a muttered curse word. “Fuck.” The mystery object was a guitar case. Finneus’s guitar, I assumed. Carlton’s shoe kicked it again, and it came even closer. No way could I reach it. I didn’t want it getting banged around anymore, though, or worse yet, lost. Keeping an eye on it was the best I could do for the time being. “Here you go.” Carlton passed me a small cup with two red caplets. “Ibuprofen. Sorry for the wait.” “Thank you.” I got water, too, but not Carlton’s full attention, so I didn’t want to bother him about the remote. “Speak up if you need anything else. Keep me on my toes, Russel.” Carlton’s toes and every other part of him needed to concentrate on Finneus Shea. “I’m fine,” I said. The moment someone wasn’t focused on saving him, I’d definitely do more to save his guitar. “Glad someone’s fine,” the medic who wasn’t Carlton said not quite quietly enough. “It doesn’t look like things are gonna end too well for Finneus.” “Oh, no!”