Yes, the video showed all of this, and I heard the doctor make some noises as he watched it.
The part I’d needed him to see was the bit that followed after my cousin had edited in the narrator's voice from SpongeBob, saying, “Five hours later.”
“Watch me fly,” Cole’s deep voice bellowed out of the device. I knew it was the moment he’d stood on the edge of the hospital bed, his ass poking out of the gown as he flapped one arm in the air, seeing as how the other one was strapped to his chest. “And a one, and a two, and a three, and a… I’ve run out of numbers. Oh my God, it’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fiiiiine.”
“Is he singing R.E.M.?” the doctor asked Sasha. Well, I assumed it was Sasha because no doctor could be mean enough to expect my brain to produce that kind of information.
“Yup.”
“Yeah, baby elephant time,” Cole bellowed after it, thrusting his hips around to make his dick jump. “If I was a man for a day, this’s what I’d do.”
“Uh, you are a man, honey,” his wife Ebru assured him. “Now, why don’t you come down from there.”
“I’m a man,” he screamed, not sounding like a man, FYI. “I get to keep it? Forever, and ever, and ever, and ever, and ever?”
“It’s how you made your kids, Cole, so you’ve always had it,” she sighed. “Now, come down from there before you fall.”
“It never looked like this before. It looks different. Like if you looked at Simba next to his dad in that movie about king lions.”
“The Lion King.”
“No,” he hummed. “That’s not the one. But in it, the little puppy stands next to his big dad, who was this awesome afro type shit going on. Aw, I want an afro.”
“It’s a lion cub, and he stands next to his father who’s the head of their pride,” Ebru ground out. “And it’s called the Lion King.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about,” he insisted. “Hey, I’ve got a penis.”
“Stop touching it before a nurse comes in here and sues us for sexual harassment.”
I knew what happened, and to condense it, he started jerking his hips around, and singing Can’t Wait To Be King, all while Ebru held her hands out to pull him down from the bed.
It wasn’t until his brother, who was taping the whole thing, couldn’t laugh silently anymore and started bellowing with laughter that Cole stopped.
“It’s Mufasa! Ooo, say it again. Mufasa, Mufasa, Mufasa.”
The doctor hadn’t made a noise for a good five minutes as he watched the video, and some people might say that was unprofessional. They could go for a shit in hell, because I was beyond grateful not to be poked, prodded, and asked questions while I puked or tried to.
Concussions sucked balls, and for some reason, medical professionals wanted to shine lights in your eyes, ask you questions and make you think. They wouldn’t let you sleep even though that’s all you wanted to do.
Everything they did just made the pain worse.
So, with my phone distracting him, I was free to throw up and die in peace.
“Have they had this man tested?” the doctor asked us.
All I could do was hold my thumb up for him. Yes, he’d been tested, and apparently, he wasn’t just sane, he was fucking Mensa level smart—which I managed to croak out to the doctor.
“I meant to see what he’s allergic or sensitive to.”
Oh. I think my whole family was so used to it being about his brain that we never considered an allergy when someone asked that question about Cole.
I did have one answer, though. “Menophobia.”
There was a long pause, just enough for the screen to play out where Cole fell off the bed, right onto his newly fixed shoulder, thus dislocating it again and breaking his collarbone this time. He lay there screaming his ever-loving ass off while Ebru hit the emergency button on the wall and Tom dropped down onto his knees, the phone skidding across the floor as he laughed.
“Mr. Townsend-Rossi, I’m fairly certain most men have a phobia against periods. We don’t suffer from them, so the thought of a woman going through that every month is displeasing for us. I’d have thought that a man of your cousin’s age who has a wife would have managed to learn to live with it, but not all men can.”
“No,” Sasha said gently, saving my brain from arguing with the man. “It’s a genuine phobia. He was diagnosed with it when he was in high school, I believe, because he had a panic attack when his science teacher mentioned the periodic table.
“I talked to Jackson’s mom about it not long ago, and she said Cole would have been prescribed medication for the panic attacks it brings on, but with him reacting like that to a lot of drugs, they felt it wasn’t in his best interests to proceed with it.