Chapter 9

Smoke inhalation is a funny thing. You don't feel too bad until your lungs start filling up with fluid. Then the tubes go in and the coughing starts

By the end of my second day in the hospital I was wishing that the firefighters had just let me die. It wasn't just the tubes and coughing either. The firefighter who had carried me out of the school wasn't the hunky twenty-something that you see in the movies. He was a barrel of a man who had more grey hair than my dad. He was very kind when he came to visit me. He never mentioned just how much of me he had seen. I'm sure he would have much rather rescued a cheerleader like Chastity.

Mom and Dad wandered in and out of the room. Mom brought me a romance novel she bought in the gift shop. Dad brought a teddy bear. I put both of them on the windowsill and tried to find something that wouldn't destroy my brain on the TV.

I was watching a Mythbusters repeat when a nurse brought in a huge bouquet of flowers. She set them on the table where I couldn't knock them over. She handed me the card and made me take a sip of water before I opened it.

I heard you were trying to rescue me when they found us. Thanks. Mr. Hall.

I muted the sound on Jamie and Adam plotting to blow up a cement truck and coughed up a pint or so of fluid. I couldn't decide how I felt about Mr. Hall thanking me. It was almost my fault that the fire happened in the first place. No one else was blaming me, but no one else was almost calling me a hero either.

I watched the cement truck get obliterated over and over again and thought that it was a pretty good metaphor for my life. I had never hoped for a normal high school life. I wasn't normal; it just wasn't going to happen. I had hoped that I might survive with the minimum of scar tissue and disappear into a world in which the only expectation was that I would excel at anything involving mathematics.

I started coughing again and this time I couldn't stop. I couldn't breathe either. I was drowning. I tried to reach the call button, but at some point I'd knocked it off the bed. I couldn't find the cord where it was pinned to my pillow and there were some black edges encroaching on my vision. The tubes kept me from moving too much, but I could see the line of the call button crossing the bedside table beside the flowers. I tried reaching across, but somehow I was all tangled in the sheets and I couldn't reach.

Almost everything was black as I grabbed the table and pulled it toward me to try to get my hand on that cord. I heard a tremendous crash as I lost the battle to breathe.

They told me that the nurses found me hanging out of the bed with flowers and glass scattered across the room. They called a code blue and put all kinds of suction tubes and stuff down my throat. They even had to shock me like they do on TV.

The internist who came to explain it all to me was a nice young doctor. I'd heard the nurses sigh over him. He was certainly cute, very empathetic too. He apologized for needing to cut my pajamas off in order to put in even more tubes. I should just post pictures on the internet. I'm sure there must be one or two people in the world who haven't seen me without any clothes on.

I couldn't ask any questions because I had at least one tube down my throat sucking crap out of my lungs. He patted me on the shoulder like I was a favourite pet then left me alone with the sounds of pumps pulling fluid out of my lungs.

Do you how hard it is to sleep with machines beeping and sucking and squishing all night? Not to mention that I had tubes coming out everywhere and most of them weren't comfortable. I would just drop off when some movement would make one of those tubes pull painfully.

I stared bleary eyed at the TV, too zoned out to even change the channel. I'd been in the hospital for days. Finally my lungs were not filling up with fluid as fast as the pump sucked them clear. The intern had been in to tell me that they were going to try taking out the suction tube. If that went well all the rest could go as well.

"Breathe out as I pull," he said. He didn't wait for me to nod, but got hold of that tube and began pulling. I tried to breathe out, but I ran out of breath before he finished. I couldn't believe how much tubing they had stuffed down my throat. I was surprised it hadn't tangled with the hoses that went up the other way. I hoped they weren't as long.

Then the tube was out and I was breathing on my own without the pump pulling fluid from my lungs. It felt great.

"One of the nurses will wait with you for a while to make sure everything goes well," the doctor said.

I tried to say 'OK', but nothing came out. He must have seen the panic in my eyes.

"It might take a while for your voice to come back," he said. "The tube can bruise the vocal chords."