Ady's Screams

The automatic doors open to allow the stretcher to fit into the long hallway. The floors are too white, probably bleached. It smells like antiseptic cleaner and blood. The nurse meets us and leads us to a pale blue room with a hospital bed, a shitty sliding door that’s come off the hinges, and a tiny television connected to a small remote-control speaker. There’s a bustle around the room and through the halls. She’s screaming, so loud. She’s tiny but fierce, and her screams make me shudder internally. The bed must be triple her size, but it fills with her blood and tears and those screams. God, those screams.

In her terror, she must have shit her pants. I don’t blame her. He came into the driveway so fast; we never saw him coming. We only heard the thud of his silver 7 passenger van smashing into the tilted concrete of his driveway, and her blood-curdling screams. I ask the nurse for wipes and a pair of scissors, and I try my best to cut her out of her underwear, without disturbing her gaping, seeping wounds. My efforts go in vain and now she’s covered in blood, and shit, and pain. The rough sheets in the emergency room bed are dusted with feces. The mixture forms a disturbing painting of a three-year-old’s simple night riding a scooter on the sidewalk, and ending in a bed, in a room, screaming and fighting to stay conscious.

I throw the underwear and about 100 wet wipes into the garbage and set the scissors haphazardly upon the table with the used gauze pads from the ambulance ride. They’ve taken some time and now she’s in and out of sleep. The television plays some Disney movie in the background, and I keep checking my phone to answer what feels like thousands of questions I don’t have the answers to. The battery bar blinks, and I set my head into my hands. I want to cry, I want to fucking fall apart, but I can’t because I’m mama and it’s my job to be strong. It’s just her and I in the room, and the dimly lit ceiling feels like a million strobe lights on my face.

Finally, a team of doctors politely walk in (I imagine they’re judging me) and ask me all of the questions I’ve already told 9-11, and her father, and the police, and the ambulance, and the nurses, and my family, and my professor, and my friends, and my work. I repeat the answers one. more. time. The doctor moves her frail little body, and she begins to scream.

#ab