Nine Calls From My Hospital Bed

The clock across from my bed

I counted the calls because the clock was mounted on the wall directly across from my bed, a big institutional clock with a red second hand that never once hesitated.

Nine.

Nine times my thumb shook against the screen of my phone while a machine beside me pushed air into what was left of my lung in slow mechanical sighs. Nine times I called my mother, then my father, then the family group text that my sister had named “The Denning Crew” three Christmases ago. Nine times the same nothing came back. Voicemail. Silence. One short reply from my mother that read, “We’re at Shelby’s helping with the move. Is it an emergency?”

I lay there in the intensive care unit of Mercy Regional in Hays and I stared at the word emergency until it stopped looking like a word at all.

A truck had run the stop sign at the corner of County Road 9 and the old grain road, a loaded semi hauling milo that did not slow down and did not honk and did not do one single thing that a person is supposed to do at a stop sign. It came through the intersection at highway speed and folded my Ford around itself like it was made of tin. I do not remember the sound. I remember the smell of the field, cut milo and diesel, and I remember a young sheriff’s deputy holding my hand through the broken window and telling me to keep my eyes on him.

My left lung had collapsed. My spleen was gone, taken out on a table in the middle of the night by a surgeon named Dr. Ferris who I have since sent a Christmas card to every year. Three of my ribs were cracked. The doctors used the word “critical” and then they used the word “watch,” as in the next day was one they wanted to watch me through, because the body can look stable and then quietly decide otherwise.

So when I texted the family, I did not use the word emergency lightly. I typed it with a hand that had a line running into a vein at the wrist.

My mother typed back to ask if it was one.