“Oh,” I said, feeling my muscles go lax with relief as his words hit home. “Are they all okay? They weren’t in whatever accident I was in, right?”
“Your parents and partner are all perfectly perfect,” he assured me. “They’re just tired.”
I nodded, slowly. “What was your name again? Doctor . . .”
“Abara,” he finished.
He gave me some more water to drink and the liquid felt like Heaven as it slid down my dry, sore throat.
“Right.” I shifted in the bed, wincing. “Doctor Abara. You aren’t going to tell me about the accident I was in, are you?”
When he mentioned it, there was reluctance in his tone though I wasn’t sure why.
“I’m going to leave that to your family,” he said gently. “It’s not my place.”
I wondered why it wasn’t his place but I didn’t linger on it; I was back to focusing on the pain in my head. I lifted my hand to the temple on the left side of my head and groaned, my eyes closing of their own accord. The doctor asked me the pain level on a scale of one to ten, and I told him it was an eight.
“You’re a tough woman, Noah.”
I opened my eyes.
“I don’t feel very tough, sir. I feel the complete opposite, if I’m being honest with you.”
Doctor Abara smiled. “You are very tough, and do you want to know why?”
I managed to give him a one-shoulder shrug.
“You just gave what is likely the worst pain you have ever experienced in your life an eight, that is why you’re tough.”
I felt myself smile at his praise. “Thanks, sir.”
I began to feel a little better as the minutes ticked by and the medicine the nurse gave me kicked in and took away the heavy pounding in my head; now I just had a painful ache to deal with rather than a constant throb. The painkillers did nothing for the throbbing in my leg though.
“How injured am I?” I quizzed the doctor. “I seem pretty beat up, and I feel it too.”
“You are,” he answered as he sat on the chair next to my bed. “This will sound like a lengthy list, but you could have been much worse off.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“You fractured your tibia in your left leg and had to have surgery. It was a bit of a mess because you have previously fractured the same bone, just in a different location. The surgery went well, and you’re healing. You had some tissue damage to your right thigh that was cleaned and stitched. Your abdomen was pierced with glass or a sharp object of some kind, but luckily it wasn’t very deep so there was no organ damage, just some ruined tissue that was stitched back together. There were some deep lacerations on your left arm, but nothing serious once cleaned and stitched. You have a dusting of cuts and bruises over your entire body, and you took a hard knock to your head which resulted in twenty-six stitches from your left temple to behind your left ear.”
I blinked. “Fucking hell.”
“My sentiments exactly,” Doctor Abara chuckled. “You are healing, Noah. Many of the minor wounds have already scabbed over, and your stitches have been removed everywhere. Yesterday your stitches in your head came out, the bandage on now is just for the light bleeding that comes with suture removal. I can remove it now.”
I was still as the doctor carefully removed the bandage around my skull. When he was finished, I lifted my hand to my temple and gasped as I gently ran my fingertips along a lengthy, jagged scabbed line that reached back to behind my ear. I realised instantly that half of my hair was shaved down to a buzz cut around the area of the wound. The rest of my hair was shorter too, cut up to my shoulders.
“Does it look really bad?”
I heard in my own voice that I was going to cry.
“No,” the doctor answered. “You will think it looks awful though.”
His honesty brought on a bubble of light laughter, which fought away my impending tears.
“I can get a mirror if you’d—”
“No,” I interrupted. “I think I need more time before I can look at it.”
I didn’t think I’d ever be ready; what my fingers felt scared me. The closed wound felt huge to touch. I could only imagine how it would look.
“That’s okay,” he assured me. “Remind yourself that everything in your body is healing and will look bad before it gets better. Things could have been so much worse, so try to remember that when you think of all of the things that are wrong right now. The majority of the damage to your body is only surface scrapes; what has you in the ICU is your brain injury.”
I had a fucking brain injury.