The fluorescent lights above my hospital bed hummed with that cold, mechanical sound that makes you feel more alone than you already are. I blinked slowly, my throat dry as sandpaper, trying to focus on the clock mounted on the sterile white wall. Three twenty-seven in the afternoon. The anesthesia was still making everything feel fuzzy around the edges, but one thing was crystal clear. The silence.
My name is Adrienne Davis, and I’m sixty-four years old. Three hours earlier, I had undergone what my cardiologist called a routine procedure to clear a blocked artery. Nothing too serious, he’d assured me, though at my age any surgery involving the heart carries its own kind of risk. I’d asked my three children to be here when I woke up. David, my oldest at thirty-eight, had promised he’d take the day off from his accounting firm. Sarah, thirty-five and between jobs again, said she’d bring flowers. Michael, my baby at thirty-two, had rolled his eyes but agreed to come by after his sales calls.
The room smelled like industrial disinfectant and something else I couldn’t quite place. Fear, maybe. Or disappointment. The machines beside my bed beeped steadily, monitoring my heart rate, my blood pressure, my oxygen levels, everything the doctors needed to know about how my body was functioning. But no machine could measure the hollow ache spreading through my chest that had nothing to do with the surgery itself.
I turned my head toward the window, wincing at the sharp pull of the IV line in my neck. Outside, the Seattle sky hung its usual gray, threatening rain that might or might not eventually fall. Cars moved through the parking lot below, people going about their lives, visiting their own loved ones. Where were mine?
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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