Christmas at Hope Cottage: A Magical Feel-Good Romance Novel(2)
Sometime after that she must have passed out.
She woke up in hospital, feeling as if she were being buried alive beneath a slab of cement, and gave a cry of pain and fear. Close to the bed, a nurse with large brown eyes blinked in surprise, backing away from the bed in shock. The next thing she knew, there were a half dozen people in the room, though she couldn’t make any of them out clearly. Behind them were strange glittering colours, seeming to flash before her eyes. She blinked, trying to make sense of any of it, but couldn’t.
Everyone began speaking at once, creating a cacophony of voices, painful and overwhelming, as if fishhooks were repeatedly pricking her ears. Emma clapped a hand over an ear, and felt another jolting stab of pain, noting through her strained vision that the other hand looked as if it had been pieced together like something for Frankenstein’s monster. Protruding from it were scary-looking pins, surrounded by a heavy white cast.
Her throat turned dry in fear. Something had gone horribly wrong. The noises were coming from the people around her and the sounds were unfathomable. At last, she saw a pair of lips move and registered the word ‘blanket’. It was the nurse from earlier. She looked down and could see, rather hazily, what looked like a thin blue covering over her legs.
‘Take it off!’ she hissed. With hesitant, shaking fingers, the nurse lifted it off, and just like that the pain stopped and so did her screams. She blinked back her tears. Struggling to understand. What had they put on her? Why had it hurt so much?
People crowded closer, and her head began to spin, her heart to race. Were they speaking another language?
No. It wasn’t that. The sounds were simply incomprehensible, the objects around her a blur; only when she focused hard on their lips did the babble change, miraculously, into words.
Then someone in a white lab coat mouthed three of the scariest words imaginable: possible brain damage.
It took a few days before they knew for sure, though Emma didn’t need the tests, or the scans, or the people who came into the room with clipboards who kept asking questions, to know it was true; she could feel it. Everything felt wrong.
It had taken some time before her vision registered that the flashing lights weren’t coming from her own head but a somewhat garish display of Christmas lights, despite the fact it was only October.
‘We start Christmas early here,’ explained a brown-haired nurse with gold tinsel threaded in her ponytail, with a small, slightly embarrassed giggle. Emma felt lost, disorientated. In another life she would have shared a grin, understood, as a fellow Christmas lover, appreciated the sentiment and the need for some cheer in a place such as this. Now, all she felt was gratitude when the nurse switched off the lights, providing immediate relief to Emma’s overwhelmed senses.
Sounds didn’t make sense: she could confuse the sound of the television with the telephone, and the click-clack of heels with the opening of a drawer. She couldn’t taste any of the food they brought and it didn’t seem to have a scent. When the giggly nurse told her that she’d be taking the flowers some thoughtful friend had sent into the nurses’ station due to their powerful perfume, she realised she hadn’t been able to smell them either; or anything else, for that matter.
She saw everything in double, which caused splitting headaches and nausea as she felt off balance too. Perhaps worst of all was the way that nothing felt the way it should: a breeze could feel like a flame, while someone’s touch might feel like ice, or nothing at all.
After a few days, a doctor explained, sitting on the edge of her bed and making sure that she could read his lips. He’d brought along a small whiteboard with a black marker just in case she couldn’t understand him, though she found that impossible to read, as the letters scrambled so much when she tried to focus on them. Luckily, if she concentrated on his mouth the words made sense, though they were hard to face nonetheless: ‘As well as your left leg and arm, which were broken, it appears your accident has caused some damage to your olfactory nerve – which has affected your senses. From what we’ve gathered, the best way to explain it is to picture your senses as if they were sets of wires, and some of these have moved slightly out of place, while others appear to have crossed or been cut off for the moment.’
She nodded. The word she would have used was scrambled, like an egg. The definition wasn’t her real interest though, not at this stage; what she wanted was a prognosis, if she could only find the right words. But speech was tricky; she had to think hard those first few days, choose words carefully, hunt for them.
She swallowed, tried to focus on the doctor’s face, saw, as if through a fog, blue eyes and a stubbled jaw, several times over like a row of negatives. ‘How long will I be like this?’ she asked, finally.
‘It’s hard to say. It may well be temporary; we have every reason to hope that is the case. However…’
Emma looked away. It was funny how just one word could undermine all the ones before it. Yet. But. Nonetheless. However.
With difficulty, she tuned in to the rest of his words, focusing on his lips to match the sounds, but she found little comfort in them.
‘I have personally never encountered an injury like this before, and from the literature available, it’s unclear – it could be months or…’ His voice trailed off and she realised that it was possible she could be like this for a long time, perhaps even permanently.
‘Our main concern, however, was that with an injury of this kind you would need care. Or that you may need to be moved to a treatment centre. But luckily, that isn’t something you need to worry about.’ He permitted himself a small chuckle. ‘I dare say you are in rather good – if a little eccentric – hands.’