Three Times Dead by D C Grant Read Free Book Online

nothing about bodies and it’s my body, or what’s left of it, that’s lying here, in pain. You have no idea what that’s like.”
    “No, I don’t know what it’s like but I’m here to support you.”
    “Don’t give me that crap. You’re just doing the dutiful mum thing but I’m a bloody cripple now. What kind of life am I going to have? I’m sick of all this shit!”
    “It’ll be all right, Bevan. You’ll get an artificial leg and you’ll be able to walk again.”
    “Like that’s going to be normal! I’m not going to be able to surf again, or do anything ever again.” My nausea was growing with my anger. “My life is fucking over!”
    “It’s not over, Bevan,” Mum said as she leaned forward. I don’t know what she intended to do – maybe she was going to give me a hug. I will never know, for at that moment I vomited all over her, the remains of the white and green pills floating around in watery bile. So much for that. After Mum had cleaned herself up, the nurse came in and gave me an injection for the pain.
     

Chapter 10
     
    You may think that hospital was a cruisey time when all I had to do was pump myself full of drugs and hallucinate, but think again. I’m just going over the highlights here. True I was out of it for most of the first week, but the second week was really tough. I was more conscious, which meant I was more aware of the pain. I was also more aware of the hospital routines. Apart from night-time, I was rarely left alone. It seemed that the nurses were always coming in taking my temperature, blood pressure, checking on the various intravenous lines that were set up. Every so often the vein into which they fixed the line would collapse and then a specialist nurse had to come in and set up another one. That hurt. Then there were the dressing changes, and the bag changes, one for piss and the other for “gunk” as Mitch so eloquently put it – the stump juice that drained off my leg. I hated to look at it because it always made me sick. The doctors would come around in the morning and look at the chart and comment on the amount of fluids coming out of me and mark something on the paper. I started eating, but nausea was a problem and my stomach seemed to have gone on strike, which meant everything I ate either sat in my gullet until it came up or else it went down and got stuck somewhere in my intestines. I lost count of the number of enemas I had.
    The first time the physios tried to get me out of bed, I fainted. Luckily, I had not quite left the bed, so I kind of slumped back down onto it. They said it was normal as I had been lying down for so long and the heart was not used to pumping blood right up to the top of the head. The next time they got me standing upright using some kind of metal frame on which I could lean all my weight, called a Zimmer frame. Old people use them. That was fine until the blood all rushed downward, drawn by gravity, and, not only did the bloody stump throb so much that I almost cried, but I nearly passed out again. The physios seem to be used to that because they had put a webbed belt around my waist and were able to pull me back up and onto the bed.
    I came to hate the physios. Not their fault really, as they were only trying to get me up on my feet, getting me mobile which they said would not only help my bowels, but would also mean they could take out the catheter. Now that was something to look forward to.
    And you would think that I’d taken the loss of my foot really well, but I’m skipping over the bits where I absolutely lost it. I usually took it out on Mum who was with me the most and an easy target. But sometimes the nurses and caregivers got it with both barrels. I’m not proud of some of things I said or did; all I can say is that it is a good thing that hospital beakers are made of plastic because several of them landed on the other side of the ward. If I was a bowler in a cricket team I would have taken the opposite team out in a