I dream of soft blurry voices and distant bright lights. Slowly, so slowly, I realize these aren’t dreams at all, but reality flittering into focus.
Colors.
Sounds.
Everything hazy and high-pitched and filled with beeping and clicking and the whooshing sounds of air.
At some point, they pull the tube from my throat. I think about screaming but then forget.
Nearby, I hear someone calling out over and over. I beg them to please stop—although only in my head—because my voice is off somewhere. Lost.
I see the light of day coming in through a window. And I hear Dr. Sowah, talking, laughing. Where is my mother?
“Eve!”
Someone calls to me from a distance, as if I’m floating far away from them.
“’Ey, lazy, open up those eyes. You can totally ’ear me.” It’s Dr. Sowah. His missing h so familiar. He always joked that he left that letter back in Ghana when he came over at age eighteen.
I think I must have smiled because he chuckles. Dr. Sowah is always chuckling.
“That’s right, I know you’re there.”
Am I? Or am I on a river?
Sliding along in the sunshine.
Safe.
Warm.
Happy.
Until he leans over me, blocking out the sun like a rain cloud. “Eve, I’m delighted to report that you are officially nineteen degrees.”
Nineteen degrees?
It’s easy to hear his pride in that number.
Nineteen.
But I can’t wrap my head around it.… This new Cobb angle measuring the tilty twist of my spine. Large progressive scoliosis meant my forever-collapsing spine was forever producing a new one. Forty-eight degrees… fifty-two… sixty-seven… who could keep track? Although, this one—nineteen—is now fixed to me.
By titanium.
The river spins me. Then stops flowing with a loud snap, sending a searing shudder all along that nineteen-degree angle.
The beginning of the second week in Massachusetts General Hospital is filled with pain, needles, thirst, and screaming—mostly mine.
I am pinned under cold wet skin and bones. I can’t breathe from the terrifying pain, the fear that this bloodied slab is forever on me, in me, is me.
Then… there is the shuffle near my IV. The surge of air deeply entering my lungs. And me, grasping at the nearest scrubs—to let them know they saved me, they have to keep
saving me—before I’m floating off again on that river, light as a duck feather.
Sometimes I wake up screaming in the light.
Sometimes I wake up screaming in the dark.
Every time I open my eyes, and even when I don’t, I scramble for the button to my morphine pump and cry out to Martin, the nice nurse, regardless if it’s his shift. And there he is, bending over my arm with an extra dose.
A rush of saliva.
A sting.
And I hear her again.
“Martin,” I whisper. “She’s here. Lidia.”
“It’s the drugs, baby,” Martin tells me. “No one’s here.”
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