Page 39 of The Happy Family

But will it?

Or will I be able to leave this hospital and go home to my family?

If it’s the latter, I’ll have surely used the last of whatever good luck I have in my lifetime. But that will be okay because I might not need any more. All I need after this is Sadie’s memory to remain damaged, the gaping black holes in it helping preserve my freedom.

She’s only just woken up from her coma and there is already more drama surrounding that woman.

I wonder how Sadie is feeling now?

I bet that, like me, all she wants to do at this point is go home and forget that this place exists.

Along with everything else she has forgotten.

TWENTY-SEVEN

SADIE

I put a hand to my head and wish it had the power to stop my skull from hurting. I’ve had headaches and migraines before, but this is something else. It’s as if somebody or something has gone inside my brain and is now trying to force its way back out again. I’ve already asked the nurses for more pain relief, and they told me they would be back with it shortly, but they also have plenty of other problems to deal with, if the alarm is anything to go by. That deafening alarm is still sounding, which is only adding to my discomfort, but I know the main reason my head hurts so much is because I suffered an injury to it that has forced me to miss almost a year of my life.

A coma.

What a terrifying scenario that I never thought would happen to me.

I’ve seen people in comas on TV or in movies, the patient lying in bed helplessly and haplessly for months or even years on end while their family rallies around them, urging them to wake up. Depending on the plot and what the scriptwriters decided should happen, sometimes they woke up and sometimes they didn’t, but either way, a coma was clearly something to dread. But then it happened to me. I slipped into a coma and I was the one lying in the bed while my family tried to wake me up. How scary for them. And how scary for me too, to be here yet not really be here at the same time either. To be living and breathing but totally out of sync with the world around me, missing out on everything that was going on, from the marvellous to the mundane.

I missed everything, from seeing my beautiful children growing and changing, to something as simple as a sunrise or sunset. I have no idea what is happening in the news, what changes there have been in my local area, was it a good summer or a bad one? From the important to the insignificant, I am totally in the dark over everything that happened since I went into my coma.

But that’s all I’m in the dark about.

I’ve been lying to the doctors and my family ever since I woke up.

I’ve told them I have no memory of what caused me to go into the coma.

That’s not the truth.

The truth is, I can remember everything.

‘I’m so sorry for the delay,’ a nurse says as she enters my room with a couple of pills and a plastic cup of water. ‘It’s crazy out there, but I have your meds here for you now.’

She hands them over and I don’t waste any time in taking them, washing down the pills with the water and hoping they work their magic quickly on my pounding head.

‘What’s going on out there?’ I have to ask, the incessant alarm begging the question.

‘I’m not sure,’ the nurse replies, but she looks stressed and I have a feeling that she does know and just doesn’t want to tell me.

It must be serious. Somebody has died, I’d guess. But then this is a hospital and people must die here all the time. Surely, they don’t sound the alarm every time that happens. Unless there has been a mass casualty event, something happening in the local area that has caused this hospital to be inundated with injured, sick or dying patients and the alarm is sounding to let every staff member here know that it is all hands on deck. If that is the case, I feel bad for distracting this nurse with my silly headache pills. But it really did feel like my head was going to explode.

‘I’ll be back to check on you shortly,’ the nurse says, already looking to leave, but before she can go, I call out to her, having to raise my voice over the alarm.

‘Please can you check on my family? I think they are still here in the hospital somewhere, but I’m not sure if they are okay and I’m worried about this alarm.’

‘Erm, yes, of course,’ the nurse says, but she seems frazzled and as if my request has just added one more thing to her to-do list that was already full before she even walked in here.

She leaves as quickly as she arrived and I am alone again. But I don’t like it. After spending so long alone, I want company. I want my children. I want my family. So I decide to try and get out of bed.

The amount of effort it takes for me to pull the sheet off that covered my lower body should be a strong sign that I have lost a lot of strength since my accident and I might not possess the necessary muscle to be able to just get up and go for a walk like I used to be able to. I ignore the warning sign and huff and puff as I make the effort to swing my legs out of bed and place my bare feet onto the cold floor, before tentatively trying to put my weight on them and stand up. No sooner do I start to rise up than my head feels as if it is in a washing machine. Everything is spinning and my vision goes blurry and before I can stop myself, I am falling backwards. Luckily, I land on the bed rather than the floor, so it’s a soft landing. But it’s clear to me that I cannot walk yet, and it could be some time until I can.

I should have known I couldn’t wake up from an almost year-long coma and just waltz out of the hospital as if everything was back to normal. If I didn’t, the doctor has already warned me that I face a lengthy road to recovery, one that I initially dismissed until he broke it down for me in several shocking steps.