Page 64 of Vital Signs
Sometimes he knew where he was.
Sometimes he didn’t.
Sometimes he called me by my name.
Sometimes he just said, “There you are,” like he’d been looking for me in a dark room.
I helped him eat when the nausea passed enough for him to tolerate food. I held a cup with a straw when his hands shook too much. I wiped his mouth without thinking, the way you do for someone you love before you realize that’s what you’re doing.
I sat with him through the dressing changes.
That was the worst part.
I didn’t look at his leg at first. I couldn’t. The bandaging. The swelling. The raw, brutal evidence of what had been taken from him.
I kept my face calm. My hands steady. My heart breaking. He never asked me to leave for those. And… I never offered.
He watched my face during them, not the wound.Like he was measuring how much of him I could still see. “You don’t have to be here for this,” he said once, quietly.
“I know,” I told him.
I stayed anyway.
He had terrible nights.
Phantom pain that made him sweat and gasp and clench his jaw as if he were trying to out-muscle something invisible. Nights when he went very still, staring at the ceiling, refusing to talk, the grief settling into him like a weight he didn’t yet know how to name.
Those were the nights I held his hand the longest, just enough for him to know I was there.
Not as a doctor. Not as his colleague.
As something closer.
The nurses noticed.
Of course, they did.
They started timing meds around when I was there. They asked me questions they could have looked up. They gave me looks that said they knew this wasn’t just professional concern anymore.
No one said anything outright.
But they didn’t have to.
By day four, he was a little more lucid.
Still in pain. Still exhausted. Still changed in ways neither of us had fully processed yet. We didn’t talk about the accident. One of his doctors told me that he might not even remember the incident. They suggested support groups, therapy; one of the older nurses had a husband who attended a support group at the Veteran’s Affairs building.
But we never talked about it.
His eyes still tracked me when I moved.
He relaxed when I sat down and frowned when I left.
“You’re still here,” he said one morning, sounding both surprised and relieved at the same time.
“I told you,” I said softly. “I’m not going anywhere.”
That was when I realized the lie in that.
