I got a foldout chair.Dad laid out on the floor and mom went to stay with Corey. She put a blanket over herself and tried to sleep, right, in an uncomfortable chair next to his bed. I think I tried to sleep in a chair, down with dad. An hour or two later, Dad woke me up and told me to go and stay with Corey, because mom was going to try and get some sleep in the waiting room, on a big couch. It was 2 or 3 at night. I walked in and sat down next to Corey. He woke up and saw me come in. He was still confused, but it was dark and he was tired. He went back to sleep and I began my struggle with the entity known as, the impossible foldout lounging chair.
The chair would hinge open to a 70 degree angle and no more. I sat there and tried to sleep. To the right of me was a large window overlooking I-630, and to the left was Corey, whose twin brother and companion for life, had everybody worried to the point of exhaustion. After feeling guilty for making so much leathery-sounding noise in my struggle with the chair, I finally managed to tip the chair backwards like it was going to fall over, but the wall wouldn’t let it.
A very large strange man was on the other side of Corey, beyond the curtain divider. He kept moving around, bending and unbending his legs, snorting, and breathing heavily through the night. The nurse came to check on him.
“I want a piece of ice. My troat is too dry. I’ve been startin my exercises.”
The Nurse told him that he could have anything to eat or drink.
“No, not yet.”
I found out later that he’d had an operation where they cut his large belly off because all the weight and fat was killing him.
As if my struggles with the chair and the constant noise from the large man were not enough, I couldn’t really sleep at all. I don’t think I slept much. I kept on waking up and looking over at Corey, making sure that he was still breathing. I was so afraid that something else was wrong with him. I kept looking over at him whenever I would fade in and out of half-sleep, checking to make sure he was ok.
Then suddenly, in the wee hours of early morning, probably around 3:30 or four, a nurse came in, looking for my mother.
“Are you her son? Where is she?”
“She’s down in the waiting room trying to get some sleep.”
“Ok, well, we just got a call that your mother needs to go see Collin as soon as she can.”
Corey was still asleep. I started shaking inside like it was all going to head south or it already had. I was so scared.
The nurse disappeared somewhere. I slowly got out of the chair and got outside the room, then rushed towards the elevator and down to the waiting room where mom and her sister Ann were trying to sleep on couches. Walking in, the room was almost completely dark, and if you closed your eyes you couldn’t tell whether you were in a crowded waiting room full of sleeping snoring old people, or a cave with slumbering tigers. I stood there in the middle of all the noise until my eyes adjusted, and found my mom. She was lying there trying to sleep, and noticed my walking up. I knelt down and told her that the doctor said she could see Collin now, not “She really needs to see him now” like the nurse had told me. I simply couldn’t say it that way.
She walked around to the smaller room and woke up dad. The three of us headed for the CVICU, or Cardiovascular Intensive Care Unit, where the nurse told me that Collin was. 10 hours before, we’d been clumsily going about our usual days of school and work and play. Now something had changed, something so awful and horrible that we didn’t say anything to each other as we walked down winding hallways, turning here and there, trying to find the place where Collin was.
A large circular metal button stuck out from the wall next to the automatic swinging doors of the CVICU. Dad looked around and pressed the button on the intercom. “Yes, we’re Collin Stephen’s parents. We were told to come see him now.”
Seconds passed and the doors swung open. Mom and dad walked together and I walked behind them. The short hallway beyond the door opened up into a large rectangular room. On the perimeter of the room were separate smaller rooms where patients of all sorts layed in beds and were attended to by diligent nurses. We kept walking around the room until we came to a plastic name holder on the wall that had my brother’s name scribbled on it. I could hear the machines beeping and the ventilator pumping and squishing the air in and out of his lungs. Mom and dad slowly walked in but I stood out in the hall, not simply stood, but actually backed up four or five steps.
I still couldn’t bring myself to see him. Not at the accident scene, not when they wheeled him towards the helicopter, and not here.
Collin was in severe condition but stable. The nurse who’d told me to get my mother here quick, had just given me a distorted message. She’d obviously been told that it was possible to see Collin now, that we could. I kept standing out in the hallway while mom and dad stood beside Collin. I looked at the floor and started to get sick. One of the nurses came and asked me if I was ok. He said I looked like I was “going to faint or something.”
I just couldn’t go in there.
I walked with mom and dad back out towards the waiting room, and went back up to the sixth floor to sleep in Corey’s room. I walked in and found the big old guy doing his leg exercises. He was sweating and his face was red as a beet.
“Hey, could you go get one of those nurses to bring me a fan? I’m burnin up in here. I really need a fan to get some air movin ta cool me off.”
I was still shaking inside from the jaunt down to the CVICU, but turned around and walked back through the dimly lit hallway to the nurse’s station. The sun would come up sometime soon. For some reason I was going after a fan for this guy, even though I’m as mentally and physically tired as I’ve ever been in my whole life. I guess it was just something that I knew I could do, some way that I could actually help somebody in the middle of all this stuff that I couldn’t control.
“That big fat guy down there, the one in Corey Stephens’ room. He wants a fan. It looks like he needs one too.”
“I know.” She said. “We’ve already submitted an order for one, but we’ll check on it again.”
It was like that with a lot of things in the hospital. Fans and extra jello for the fat guy, pillows, blankets, more chairs, …all that stuff was hard to come by. You had to go find it yourself or submit “an order” for it and wait for half a day for somebody to specifically bring the said item to a said room.
The next morning my eyes. This was still happening and wasn't a horrible dream. I saw some of my friends. I can’t remember who it was, on that first morning, but they woke me up and were talking to Corey. I looked over and Corey seemed to be doing ok. He still had the IV going.
He couldn’t remember anything at all about the previous day, and asked where he was. I told him, and he never forgot it again. He was back.
. . 
