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Deflated

5 years ago

I had no idea what was happening. All I remember after being found in the closet by the police was being put in the back of a car, people talking at me, someone wrapping a blanket around me, and passing out when I got out of the car, all while holding on to my sister. When I woke up, I was in an unfamiliar place. The walls were white, there was a beeping monitor next to me and wires that were stuck to my chest. I was wearing some sort of dress that felt like it was made out of paper and nothing underneath. I sighed with relief when I saw my sister sleeping soundly in some sort of crib right next to me. I tried to reach for her, but felt a pinching sensation in my arm, when I looked, I saw a tube going into it. That was enough to send me over the edge as all the events from the previous night came flooding back.  I screamed at the top of my lungs, started pulling the stickers that were connected to the wires off of my chest, the noise was enough to make my sister wake up and start crying. When I heard her start screaming, I quieted. For some reason the sound of her wailing was oddly comforting. Seconds later, people came flooding into the room. A woman in a white coat rushed to my bed side while a woman in a blue uniform picked my sister up and started trying to soothe her. The woman in the white coat started talking at me, but I couldn't hear anything over the noise in my head, and my sister crying. Somehow, over all of this, I found my voice. I looked at the woman trying to get my sister to stop crying and said, "Give her to me, please. Let me try." Without hesitation she placed the baby in my arms who I got to quiet down by singing to her for a moments. It's how I always got her to calm down at home. Mom would let me sing the baby to sleep when she was having a fussy night. When she stopped crying, I felt my mind clearing. I laid there for a while with my sister, and closed my eyes. For a moment, I was almost okay. I winced when a voice cut through the silence. "Cynthia, how are you feeling," my eyes snapped open and I saw the woman in the white coat was still standing next to my bed side. She was smiling down at me in a way I found irritating. "Where am I?" I asked. She responded calmly "You're in the hospital. You collapsed last night, so they brought you and your sister here." 

"Is something wrong with her?" I asked. Suddenly alarmed.

"Not at all. She's perfectly healthy. We just thought it best to bring her here so we could keep you together through this."

"Is anyone else alive?" I whispered.

The woman, whom I was just then realizing was the doctor, kept smiling, but I saw her eyes lose their smile. It was an expression I had seen a million times before. I would see it on my dad's face when he had bad news. The time our dog died, the time my grandmother got cancer, the time I came home and Clara had . ripped up my art project. That look on the doctor's face was all I needed to know, everyone was gone. My breath caught in my throat, tears started running down my face, and I couldn't breathe. Someone took the baby out of my arms which only made me panic more. My head was somehow lifted up and a mask was put over my face. "Cynthia," I heard someone say. "Honey, I need you to breathe. I know it's impossible, but you need to breathe." It felt like oxygen was being forced down my throat. Finally, I started gasping for air, and kept hearing the doctor's voice. "That's it. Just breathe. That's all you need to do right now, is just breathe. There you go. Keep breathing." I started taking deep breath's and was able to eventually calm down. But it wasn't long after that I had another attack. For day's I kept having panic attack after panic attack. They stopped trying to give me oxygen and talk me down because it stopped working after a while. Afterwards, when I had an attack, a nurse would just come in with a needle and syringe, and I would go to sleep. And when the attacks finally stopped, I became lifeless. It took that long for the realization to sink in that my family was dead. I stopped picking my sister up when she cried, I stopped eating, I stopped drinking, I stopped bothering to get up to used the bathroom, I didn't talk to anyone. The nurses accommodated these things. They gave me a feeding tube, kept me hydrated, equipped me with a bed pan at certain points of the day, and changed me and the sheets when I soiled myself. I didn't care. I was in shock. My family was gone. I couldn't cope with it. So I became a lifeless husk of a human.