He knew he was beginning to make progress when he started to notice the nurses. Most of them were pleasant enough, but one in particular caught his eye. When she took his blood pressure, and his arm inevitably found itself in the vicinity of her breasts, at the same time he was trying to take a peek down her scrubs (not really low-cut enough). At least once she caught him looking, and just grinned at him.
She knew he wasn't going to be chasing her any time soon. He'd broken an arm, a leg, and a few bones in his pelvis in a motorcycle accident. Adding insult to injury, they'd catheterized him within an hour of his arrival in the ER, long before the payload of morphine had whisked him into the haze in which he'd spent the next few days. And now that he was on the other side of that haze, he still remembered how bad that had hurt. Remembered it more vividly than all the broken bones, than laying on the hard X-ray table, than the bouncing he'd endured in the ambulance on the way.
A couple of cliches averted, in his case. He hadn't woken up a week later wondering what had happened. He'd seen the asshole drive right into him, could see what model cell phone he'd been yakking on, and still remembered everything, except for the part after he'd finally been given enough drugs to get to sleep, or at least into some kind of daze. And he hadn't once asked how his bike was. He didn't give a shit about his bike. He was done with motorcycles.
Within days, he'd had the surgeries which pinned him back together. He'd talked to the doctors and they were saying he'd be fine after a few more weeks of healing and physical therapy. And now he was basically waiting. Healing. Watching TV. Dealing with the indignities of adult diapers because he couldn't tolerate a bedpan, and the agony of getting rolled to his side to change him, or his bedclothes. Pushing the button on the morphine drip. Chatting up nurses. And wondering if he'd ever see his penis again. It was still attached, but had been run through with the catheter, suffering from major shrinkage, and completely submerged by his scrotum, which was the size of a softball. They didn't think anything was really damaged, but it had swollen because of all the other injuries and internal bleeding.
Most of the nurses were pleasant enough, but one in particular had caught his eye. She kidded him about the TV shows he was watching, told him about her problem patients, kept him informed about what they were putting in his IVs. While many of the other staff clucked at him about having been a motorcyclist, she told him that she sometimes rode with her boyfriend. She kept his sponge baths from becoming a freezing torture session by using warm water and drying him off thoroughly in sections. Over time, he learned to ask her to do the sponge bath during her shift, not out of any erotic desire to have her handle his body (especially at first, the less his body was handled, the better), but because she kept him warm and comfortable. She laughed with him about the state of his body, since he didn't have any major worries about permanent impairment. Once when she was bathing him she blurted out, "If you can get your penis to match that scrotum, you'll really have something there," and they'd laughed so hard another nurse had run in to check on them.
Okay, her looks didn't hurt. She wore fitted scrubs that were made for women, not the one-size-fits-all tops and bottoms that looked like they were picked out of the supply closet. They were loose around her waist, but you could tell she had a nice figure underneath. What he could see of her body was toned. Her dark brown hair was kept short in a pageboy cut. Her makeup was minimal and neat. She smelled clean, which was borderline miraculous given what all she had to deal with when she was on shift.
It was the last week he was in the hospital before going on to in-patient physical therapy, and she came by on her rounds. She was taking his blood pressure, and his hand lay on her arm as she applied the cuff. After she got the reading: "Looks like they've got you disconnected from about everything. Down to a few pain pills daily, I see."
"Yep. Even yanked the catheter out earlier today."
"Oh, surely we didn't
yank
it out." She giggled softly and took off the cuff. She stuck the thermometer in his mouth.
"That's what it felt like."
"Shhh." She got the temperature reading and popped the probe cover in the waste container. "Would you rather we did it slowly?" She laughed again. "Who did it?"
"I think it was Michael."
"Oh, okay, maybe we did yank it out. Do you want me to bathe you while I'm here?"
"Please."
