A Time to Embrace by Karen Kingsbury

Author:Karen Kingsbury
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Romance, Contemporary, Fiction
ISBN: 9781418513016
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2002-10-27T22:00:00+00:00

122

Iil In ill lffII1,” 111

IT WAS LIKE DRAGGING AROUND A HUNDRED POUNDS of dead weight.

Four weeks had passed since the accident, and doctors had moved John to a room in the rehabilitation unit. They had certain goals, certain benchmarks for him to attain: transferring himself from a bed to a wheelchair, and from a wheelchair to the toilet and back again. They wanted him to dress himself and know how to look for sores on his legs and torso. Today’s lesson was about knowing when an open wound needed medical treatment.

“Sores represent an insidious threat, Mr. Reynolds.” The physical therapist was slender, in his late thirties. Clearly he was passionate about his job, intent on bringing independence to those like John, who had recently joined the ranks of paraplegia.

John hoped the man would forgive him for being less than enthusi astic.

“Mr. Reynolds, are you listening?”

“Hmmm?” John hadn’t realized how many people called him Coach until he’d been admitted to the hospital. Even after four weeks it didn’t sound right … Mr.

Reynolds, not Coach Reynolds. It was as ugh the doctors and nurses and rehab technicians were talking ut someone altogether different than the man he’d once been. But then that was exactly right, wasn’t it? He wasn’t the man he’d not before the accident. “I’m sorry. Say it again.” “Sores … see, they develop on areas where your body gets rubbed on a regular basis. The problem is, with paralysis you can’t feel the rubbing. The situation becomes especially dangerous after you’ve been in a state of paralysis for several months or more. That’s when your body begins to show signs of muscle atrophy. Without the muscle barrier, bones have been known to rub clear through the skin. So you can see the problem, Mr. Reynolds.” John wanted to knock the man over with his wheelchair.

Better yet he wanted to yell, “Cut!” at the top of his lungs and watch a dozen stagehands rush onto the scene to tell him he could get up now. The filming was over. Of course, he could actually do neither of those things. If he wanted to get home before Christmas, he could only sit here and listen to some stranger tell him how his legs were going to waste away and that sores were going to appear on

123 his body in the process. John settled against the back of the wheelchair, his eyes on the man’s mouth. It was still moving, still explaining the reality of John’s situation in meticulously vivid detail. But John was no longer listening. His body might be a prisoner, but his mind could go wherever it wanted. And right now he wanted to think back over the past month. From the moment he’d come to that Saturday after the accident, John had known he was in trouble. He had no memory of the accident, nothing at all. One moment he was pulling out of the Marion High parking lot, the next he was waking up in a hospital bed, feeling like he was choking to death.

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