Perfect Strangers: Friendship, Strength, and Recovery After Boston's Worst Day by Sdoia Roseann

Author:Sdoia, Roseann [Sdoia, Roseann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2017-03-28T04:00:00+00:00

chapter seven

THE KID WITH THE TOURNIQUET

A WEEK AFTER the bombing, and finally out of the woods medically, I was transferred to the Spaulding Rehabilitation Center with several other critically wounded survivors of the blast. Eventually, thirty-one survivors and fourteen of the seventeen who had lost limbs ended up in Spaulding. We called it the “old Spaulding”—a grim, dingy building from the 1970s. It sat, sad and ugly, on a spit of land amid the North Station train tracks and across the street from the Nashua Street jail. But at least it wasn’t Mass General. It had a lot of the same antiseptic sights and smells, but it was a place for healing, not merely surviving, and I was more than ready to heal.

Most times when I woke up, Mom or Dad or Gia or one of my girlfriends would be sitting nearby, lightly dozing or reading a book. I can’t remember a time when I was alone in the room. They’d notice I was awake, and more often than not, they’d tell me that the firefighter, Mike Materia, was in the waiting room, just, well, waiting. For what I didn’t know. But just knowing he was close by and seeing him there in my room, shy and always in the background, almost as if standing guard, gave me what little comfort I had in the weeks following the attack. After Gia’s call to him asking him to come back, he did—almost every day.

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