him upset.
Hospital time moves at its own erratic-stopwatch pace, tick-tick-ticks between episodes and crises and appointments and surgeries and shifts and dosages. The protocols and routines stretch time in the strangest way and I begin to forget about things outside the hospital, the school assignments I was supposed to turn in, brushing my teeth. They take me off life support; I retch and gag as the thick tube crawls out of places I didn’t know I had. My lung collapses again and they put my chest tube back in. It goes straight into my side and I feel every single fiber as it moves through me. They poke my stomach with needles full of blood thinners that leave pinkish-brown bruises behind; they wait and they monitor. They empty the pee bag, I fill it again. I watch it all lazily, one foot outside my own body on a slow, sleepy opiate trip from a forest of gifted flowers: fluffy carnations and orange lilies shaped like stars, an orchid that I will let die. Even with my mom beside me, the hospital can be a lonely place and sometimes at night when the halls are quiet, I worry that life will never go back to normal.
The cheerleaders come to see me; a blue-and-white oasis of tracksuits and too much blush glows against the ashy walls of the hospital. I can’t see them, the doctors are busy fiddling with my chest tube, but they find my mom in the waiting room and surround her with their blueness. They’re on the way to a football game in another town but they have stopped by to see me. I should be on the bus with them, cheeks covered in glitter, big bow on the top of my head. They tell my mom with the mad conviction all cheerleaders are made of that they know I can get better. Their heads nod, their ponytails flick up and down, their little hands clap reflexively. She visits with them for a bit and they brighten up the sterile tan waiting room with their colorful uniforms.
“Miss Marsha, make sure you watch the nine o’clock news,” one of them says on the way out the door.
My mom smiles and squeezes her hand. I should be with them, but instead, I am in a bed with a half-shaved head and atrophied legs.
* * *
“And Ruthie Lindsey, a young local girl…”
An hour later, I wake up to the sound of my name. My mom is sitting by my shoulder, smiling at the little television in the corner. Our big-haired local news lady is broadcasting live on the scene from the end zone. The one-man technical team struggles against the noise and the lights and the fury of Friday night football and keeps losing the poor news broadcaster in the crowd. She is wearing a bright blue ribbon in the corner of her blazer, right above her heart. She points to it with a seventeen-tooth grin and explains that it is for me. Then she tells a story I feel like I’m hearing for the first time.
“She had a five percent chance of survival and a one percent chance of walking.…”
I take an inventory of my broken bones and missing pieces as she lists them.
The camera slowly pans around the stands and I notice everybody is wearing a blue ribbon; people from my school and this school and other schools, people I know well and people I will never meet. They’re saying my name, “Ru-thie, Ru-thie, Ru-thie.”
On the opposite edge of the field, I see the cheerleaders. They are clinging to the edges of a big bust-through that says ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE. THIS ONE’S FOR YOU, RUTHIE. The camera zooms in as a stampede of testosterone rips through it and heads straight for the little news lady, engulfing her. Jerome waves from the field and blows me a kiss. I catch it even though he can’t see me. I laugh out loud for the first time and it wakes me, the happy music bounces off the ceiling and for a moment, I’m just a teenager. A Stouffer’s Lean Cuisine commercial steals the moment away from me and as the TV lasagna releases big puffs of steam, I know that I need to get back there, to those people.
I’ve been in the hospital eight days when I’m healthy enough for my spinal fusion. It’s almost Thanksgiving now, and though I’ve been too nauseous from the medicine to eat anything but hunks of