Right Through Me

Sirens blared through the still night sky. In a haze of flashing red lights, I slowly opened my eyes, thoroughly confused about what was going on. I was in my car, the windscreen in front of me shattered to bits, my head throbbing something awful. I looked beside me and there she was, knocked unconscious, or worse... dead.

It all came back to me in a flash. The mis-steer, the car smashing into the side of the building. I tried to remember what I had tried to avoid which caused the fateful swerve, but my mind drew a black.

Ambulances had already arrived at the scene, there were a couple of paramedics prying the passenger side door loose, pulling her out and placing her onto a gurney.

I stumbled out of the car myself, relatively un-injured by the crash, it seemed. Besides the head ache, I didn't seem to have any other major injuries.

She was rushed to a nearby ambulance in a haze of frantic EMT activity and general medical mumbo jumbo. I tried to overhear what her situation was, but couldn't make out any words clearly. I realized my ears were ringing. Probably part of the headache.

In a confused daze, I automatically climbed into the back of the ambulance with her. Fighting every throbbing cell in my brain, I attempted to shout a few words of encouragement to her unconscious body. The paramedics probably just assumed we're together, having been in the same vehicle, and didn't seem to object to me tagging along. In fact, they barely seemed to care I was in for the ride.

Reaching the hospital set off another set of frenzied actions. Hospital staff appeared from nowhere at the ambulance door and whisked her away through the swinging metal doors before I had a chance to stumble out and on to the sidewalk.

Catching up, I saw her being wheeled into a room to the left of the waiting area, and rushed in after the group of nurses surrounding her stretcher.

Another vague exchange of medical jargon between an ER doctor and his nurses, and from nowhere an onimous looking device I understood to be a defibrillator emerged. The doctor moved swiftly, and before they had a chance to clear the room of people (namely me), vaselined the cold metal plates and zapped her.

Nothing.

He repeated the action three more times before she sputtered suddenly to life. At that moment, all the stress in the world seemed to be lifted off my little shoulders. She was alive. All this time, I was more or less sure she would have been, but there was always that little voice talking to me in the back of my head, saying "she's dead".

She opened her eyes slowly, amidst hacking and coughing, and eventually they came to rest on my relief-drenched gaze. In that moment, my feeling of euphoria vanished. Something about the way she looked at me broke my heart. Why? I didn't know. A single tear escaped her eye and rolled down her cheek.

And that's when the doctor turned and walked right through me.