Chapter 1: Diary of a Vegetable

Time, I found, is rather flexible when you’re a human vegetable.

Though that just might be the drain bramage talking…

I remember waking up, I think, in a hospital room. Light blue walls, light filtering in through a window on my right and what I assumed is what’s left of me nestled in a reclining bed clad in one of those gowns or shifts, or whatever they call them.

I say I think, because everything was smudged and… vague, as if it were a dream. I felt oddly disconnected from myself, (is that what someone means when they say an out-of-body experience?) like my flesh wasn’t my own.

I remember blinking and suddenly I was in a different room and it was night. Pastel swirls printed into the walls over sterile tile floors, with the lovely stench of bleach floor cleaner stinging my nose. I coughed and sputtered, the scent suddenly overwhelming, overpowering. As if it were scalding my lungs and scraping my throat. I remember seeing a few blobs in the vague shape of nurses burst through the door and the desperation I felt as I struggled to reach out to them for help.

I also remember the confusion and horror when I realised I couldn’t feel my arm.

When I took my next breath I felt… wobbly. Weak. Fragile. Had that been the only thing I had noticed I would have been more concerned about it. I was more distracted by the blurry outline of my Father shooting up from the seat beside me, in yet again a different hospital room with warm burgundy walls and an open window letting in a pleasant spring breese.

My father wasn’t a large man, though he did stand a few inches taller than me. He had a certain… presence though, that is difficult to describe. As if his natural charisma possessed its own gravity, drawing every man, woman, and child into his subtle orbit.

There was no gravitational pull when he looked down at me from my bedside. No twinkle in the sky blue eyes I had inherited from him. What struck me like a lightning bolt on a clear summer day was that my Dad was in tears.

Very rarely was my father not without a clever smirk or a sly smile hovering somewhere on the edge of his face, a snarky or sarcastic quip on the tip of his tongue. I had only seen my father cry two times in my life, and both times they were moments that, looking back on my childhood, had undeniably changed his life.

I’m not sure I wanted to know how my condition would mean for him now.

I could hear him when he spoke, but it sounded distant and ethereal. Like was shouting from the other end of a long tunnel. I wanted to say something, I wanted to hug him, Just respond somehow, but… But I couldn’t. I could feel my arms, let alone move. My lips moved, but had a mind of their own. Like I had short-circuited somewhere between where my brain sent signals to my mouth. I wouldn’t know until later just how accurate that analogy was.

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My father saw how hard I was trying, and my distress at my inability to do something so simple, and he only cried harder, cradling me in his arms as I cried myself.

When I blinked next, I was in the same room, my mother on my right, and though I didn’t know it until I looked down, she was holding my hand, a faded paperback in the other as she read.

Mom was in a sentence, my father’s polar opposite. Where he is warm and clever, she is ice cold and blunt. Where my father was shorter and stocky, my mother was slender and tall. Easily topping all of us by a good foot.

Contrary to popular belief though, Mom wasn’t a cold fish or some unfeeling ice-queen. She was just more tactile and quiet with her emotions. I hadn’t realized this until I had moved out of the house, but when I had come home one Christmas I remember with stark clarity how Mom’s touch would constantly trail over things she was fond of. The dogs, my father, my little brother, the blanket my Dad had sewn together for her one year (yeah, my Dad’s a man of many random talents). She liked to have things she liked close and at hand.

Just like now, quite literally. Though, no matter how much I tried to reach out and concentrate… I still couldn’t feel my Mom’s hand on mine. The hand I saw poking out of the gown I was wearing was alien to me. Boney and shriveled. As if it were wasted away.

Dread crept from the pit of my stomach. What is happening to me? Last I remember my Father was in the room and I hadn’t been some skin-dressed skeleton.

I tried to speak, to ask Mom what was going on, but somehow my body translated “move my lips” into erratically jerking my head back and forth mumbling random nonsense. (and scaring the living daylights out of my mom.)

She had dropped the book she had been reading and turned to me, her soft voice more frantic than I could ever remember, but I could already feel the slow tired sensation I began to recognise as me fading back behind my eyelids.

As it turned out, by then I had been wandering on the edge of a coma for over six months, my body atrophied from cosplaying as a… well a human vegetable. Though I wasn’t fully conscious for most of it it had appeared like I had woken up pretty often. Maybe I actually had woken up and I just could remember. Maybe after I was… hurt… my memory is shot, along with the rest of me.

Days passed like this, fractured and confusing. Days would turn into weeks, that would turn into months in a single blink of an eye. Along the way though, I pieced together what’s wrong with me.

Quadraplegic. They called me. An overachieving Paraplegiac. In layman’s terms, I’m paralized from the neck down. I supposed I shouldn’t have been surprised. I knew I was hurt bad. Wounds to my back, spine and my head and face. It all sounds so… surreal. You know, cut and dry when a doctor tells the room the list of damages, asif he was reading off a fucking laundry list.

I was trapped in a broken body, damned to wander in lost circles though the winding, inescapable labyrinth of my damaged mind... but it wasn’t all bad.

I would glimpse fragments of sunshine warming my face, the only place I could still feel to some extent, my living corpse of a body folded in a wheelchair with the loving presence of one of my parents behind my shoulder, pushing me along. The sounds of laughter nearby when someone from my family would crack a joke, or the conflicted and sad expression on my best friend’s face when I finally saw him and finally remembered.

Even the fleeting moments when I was aware of myself and alone, wallowing in grief and despair and feeling utterly, entirely hopeless and alone. The kind of moments that drove me to my preverbal knees praying to God to end this torment or beg him for a second chance.

I held onto these tiny memories greedily, adding them to my precious hoard of moments that I can definitively call me.

The Diary of a Vegetable isn’t the most exciting read, but it’s my story, it’s mine.

And it was about to get a whole lot more exciting.

It all started the day my prayers had been answered, trailing in on the grubby coattails of a gangly Mad-scientist reject clutching a clipboard like a shield against the world.

Or more specifically from one Mama Morgan.