I was running on hard packed sand, bare feet flying, skirting the shoreline as the tide rose and fell. I felt fine mists of sea spray on my face, the wind whipping my hair in a tangle behind my head. A kind of baptism. I ran until my legs ached and I could feel each step pound up through my heels and my toes. I ran until my lungs burned and I had to slow, double over and gulp at the air to catch my breath.
I was almost gone. That was what they told me later. Not in those first moments when I came back around, swimming up into consciousness, surfacing for air, catching a few snatches of words, and then slipping back into sleep again. When I slept I ran. Always running until my muscles throbbed and my chest tightened and I gasped for air. I never had any sense of where I was running and I never looked back. I just ran until it hurt too much to carry on.
Those first few hours were all like that. Eyes flickering open, feeling the heaviness of my head in a pillow, the impossibility of movement, hearing voices, fragments of sentences, and then giving in again to the weight of sleep. After a while it was the pain that kept me conscious until someone adjusted something on a machine next to me and it receded enough for the weight to pull me back down again. Back down for my body to rest but my mind to run.
They must have told me several times what had happened. I could tell, when I was finally able to hear their words, process the sentences, that they’d said all of this before. They were patient but it was too fluent, too rehearsed. I did process the sentences but I don’t think, then, that I really grasped what they were saying; I was drifting in and out of a dream and surely the story about a girl who caught a virus and developed complications and almost died couldn’t be real. Could it? And yet the evidence was all there for me to feel in my ravaged body, in each rasping, ragged breath, in each attempt to move my legs or my head.
I remembered the ICU and the night that we’d all sung to each other across our video connection was still vivid. After that, it was fractured, fragments of memory as if someone had torn them up and scattered them through my head, a paper trail of clues. Flicking through old photos, a message to James, fleeting conversation with the girls, trying to disguise my demise, and then a jumble. Images of my trip to South America that might have been from the photos but might have been from a feverish delirium. And then nothing until the sensation of running, running, endless running to exhaustion, to standstill, to waking, to lying in this bed, battered but alive.
When they thought that I’d understood they asked me about the pain. I could scarcely speak which seemed to signal to them that they didn’t need to ask; they administered some sort of sedative and let me slide back into a state of restless rest. That seemed to be us for days, perhaps a week, time lost its grip, and the only cycle I recognised was sedated or not sedated. Minutes vanished in a woozy, dislocated haze; hours evaporated; days passed.
They connected me to my family, holding a video call up on a tablet, my parents wearing their best faces of reassurance but I could see the lines under Mum’s eyes and I heard the worry in Dad’s voice. I don’t know how much they’d been told but it was obvious that this hadn’t been a routine stop in the ICU. I didn’t recognise where they were until they told me they’d driven up to Bristol, were staying in a hotel until they were allowed to see me. They couldn’t visit whilst I was in the HDU. I managed to raise my arm to wave. I was still surprised at how thin, how frail and forlorn it looked. It didn’t look like mine.
When I finally croaked out words I asked the medics about my friends. They told me about Leah and Cora’s release and said they were doing fine. There was a yawning gap in the conversation where April should have been; they seemed reluctant to fill it. I insisted, forcing out a wheezing question: where’s April? They moved to a corner of the room and seemed to confer, exchanging whispers before reaching a consensus. That decision meant a deferral to a different doctor, someone I hadn’t seen before, some older guy who peered down at me through black rimmed glasses.
He told me.
He told me that she saved me. That she was immune and they thought that her blood plasma might contain enough antibodies to manufacture a vaccine. That she had offered herself up, a donation paid in blood, to see if it would work on me, an immediate and massive transfusion to pull me back from the brink. That I would have been lost without her intervention, our connection. That it worked. He told me that she saved me.
Where is she?
He paused, looked away briefly, but then he told me that too. The loss of blood had been too fast, they didn’t really understand the reaction, were still trying to figure out what had happened. They had induced a coma to stabilise her. That’s where she was. Unconscious and alone, here but not here, somewhere between.
I tried to cry out but there was no sound, just the hollow rattle from my healing lungs, and then tears running from the corners of my eyes down into my ears. No wind and spray from the endless beach in my mind, just the thin whistle of air and leaking of water from my body. I didn’t want this baptism. I didn’t want to be reborn if this was the cost.
42 @ 42 