Chasing the Sun

It was nearly three o’clock in the morning by the time Abbey made her way out of her office in R&H Design Firm’s office and towards her white BMW X3 SUV on the sixth floor of the Fifth Avenue parking garage. As she conformed her body to the tan leather seats, she closed her eyes and rested her head back on the headrest, sticking the key into the ignition and turning the engine over. Her head throbbed and her body was exhausted, she was more than ready to slip into a big t-shirt and underneath the sheets of her and Tyler’s king sized bed.

Starting up the car and pulling out of her parking spot, she began the same twisting and circuitous route back to the four bedroom, three bath red brick home that she and Tyler owned right outside of Sewickley Heights, only this time she didn’t make it back home. Sleep took over, and played Devil’s Advocate for her- if you could say that, even- and instead of making it back, safe and sound, she would end up finding herself in a place she would have never guessed in almost a million and a half years.

Tyler woke up from the shrill, high-pitched ring of the home phone. Rubbing his eyes furiously to get the sleep out, he glanced over at the clock; it was almost a quarter to five, and unless he slept through it, Abbey never let him know when she had gotten home.

The phone rang again, and he pushed himself up off of the couch and towards the kitchen where it was located, not even bothering to look at the caller ID- something he often regretted because of fan girls that somehow found out his phone number and called at ridiculous hours of the morning- he picked up.

“Hello?” he answered, running his hands through his bed head and sitting down on one of the barstools next to the breakfast bar.

“Mr. Kennedy?” The voice asked, waking Tyler up because of the seriousness of the tone. He confirmed that he was who the voice was looking for and the woman began to speak more, with each passing word his heart broke into tiny pieces. “Mr. Kennedy, my name is Yvette Davidson and I am one of the neurosurgeons at the University of Pittsburgh’s Medical Center,” Tyler’s world took to a standstill as soon as the word ‘neurosurgeon’ was out of her mouth, everything that she had spoken after sounded like the adults in episodes of Charlie Brown; a steady stream of warbled tones.

“What?” he asked, hoping and praying that somehow, someway what he had just heard was some kind of a mistake.

“Ms. McNealy was in a serious car accident. It seems to be that she was driving and fell asleep at the wheel, and crashed head-on into a telephone pole… Currently she’s in stable- but critical- condition in our intensive care unit.” Again, only certain words were able to be picked out from his brain; intensive care unit, car accident, sleep.

“Am I able to see her?” he asked cautiously. He knew over the telephone- because of his basic knowledge of HIPPA- that any kind of medical professional was not going to be giving him any information, if he wanted answers hopefully they would give it to him straight up.

“Of course,” she smiled on the other side of the phone. Too many times Dr. Davidson had seen families not want to come and visit their relatives- because of the high stress- after they were involved in serious accidents. “When you get to the hospital, go to the fourth floor, and page for one of the assistants and say you’re here for ICU bed five.”

Before hanging up the telephone, Tyler noticed how the doctor never assured him that his girlfriend- his fiancée- would be okay. It had been completely the opposite on how the television doctors in all of those Grey’s Anatomy episodes he had been forced to watch over the years had. At that moment a quote his dad had always preached growing up popped into his head, hope for the best but expect the worse, the elder Kennedy had always said whenever something- even menial- had gone wrong; it had always been a fairly sound piece of advice.

Temporarily his brain began to function again, and after setting down the telephone onto the counter, he took the tan carpeted stairs two at a time, finally making it to the top and into the master bedroom.

He didn’t worry about how he looked. The worst was probably just coming up and looks weren’t his top priority at the moment. Shoving his socked feet into a pair of tennis shoes, and slipping on a pair of jeans, he took to the stairs again and snagged his car keys off of the kitchen counter- left not on the hook, something he noted that would’ve driven Abbey crazy had she seen it- opening the garage door as he hopped into his truck.

Midway to the hospital, Tyler’s chest began to tighten and intense waves of pain radiated through his muscular arms and for a millisecond, he could’ve sworn he was having a heart attack. Just as soon as that went away, a sickly, sweet feeling churned in his stomach forming huge, uneasy knots. The woman who he had been dating since sophomore year of high school and was set to marry next summer was in the Intensive Care Units at one of the most prolific hospitals in western Pennsylvania, and he had no clue how serious her condition- albeit critical- actually was.

__

Breathe, Tyler, Breathe, he had told himself ever since he entered the main entrance of UPMC. The antiseptic smell of hand sanitizer burned the inside of his nose as he briskly strode down the white painted halls.

“Mc—McNealy. She’s in bed five,” he finally spoke after exiting the elevator on the fourth floor. His hands were still shaking, they hadn’t stopped from the moment he heard from Dr. Davidson. The older woman looked up from her copy of Fifty Shades of Grey, and typed in a bunch of letters into the computer in front of her; seconds later, a white label printed off and she instructed him to place the sticker onto his sweatshirt and wash his hands before he went into the room. “Th—Thank you ma’am.” He smiled small as she nodded and pressed the button to allow him into the Intensive Care Unit. He thanked her again and began his way down the quiet hallway.

Outside of the room labeled 5 a petite woman with her grey hair piled up on top of her head and a white lab coat wrapped around her shoulders, sat hunched over the table, writing furiously. She sat up once Tyler walked up, placing her pen down and extending her hand towards him.

“You must be Tyler,” she guessed as he nodded in confirmation. They must have found her wallet; there was a ton of picture of them together tucked away into it. “I’m Dr. Davidson, the attending on Abbey McNealy’s case.” Not to look too much into it, but Tyler thought that the way she said case almost sounded negatively. No negativity, he silently willed himself.

“The first thing I want to say is that Ms. McNealy was extremely lucky to be able to have only the injuries she sustained. From what we were let known by the paramedics, she must have driven head-on into a telephone pole, and was unconscious when they arrived on-scene.” Tyler began to get the nauseous, sick pit feeling back in his stomach. He wasn’t exactly sure he could handle hearing all of the nitty-gritty.

“Secondly, her injuries. Upon arrival, the trauma staff downstairs checked her out and determined that along with a traumatic head injury, she had multiple cuts, bruises, and seven broken ribs. An orthopedic doctor will be in to speak with you in regards to that situation, but as the chief on-call attending for neurological conditions, she was first sent to me.” Chief, in a way that comforted Tyler. She had to be in the best hands possible, right?

“Because of her head injury, we saw on a CT scan that she had internal bleeding in her brain. The only solve- typically a quick fix- is to go in and relieve the pressure, and take the clot out of her brain. Because of the clot that Abbey had, it was a little more difficult to get, but we got all of it. Thankfully. The only issue with it is it was that because of the momentous amount of pressure in her head and brain, we had to leave a flap of her skull partially cut off… The next forty-eight hours will be the hardest because risk of infection, and--”

“But she’s going to live?” he finally interjected, not being able to go without asking the question much longer. Dr. Davidson took her glasses off and set them down. She let out a deep sigh—it wasn’t good.

“As I said, the next forty-eight are the most important and critical. On Tuesday if there is no infection, we will go in for another surgery to see how much pressure is settled on the brain. If the pressure has subsided enough, we will reattach the skull flap and suture up, then another twenty-four hour wait, and if all things go good there we will be able to do a set of neurological tests to determine whether or not there is still function.”

Function. He could have thrown up at that moment. In the hallway outside of his fiancées hospital room, hearing indirectly about how she still might not live.

“Mr. Kennedy? Would you like to sit down? I realize that this is a plethora amount of information that I just threw at you,” he shook his head. He just wanted to find out all the information that he could, and then see Abbey. “Alright, but to answer your question, as of right now we don’t know. Sometimes these things sort these things out for themselves, and sometimes you’re left with a lot of broken pieces, and a broken family. But we will do whatever we can to make sure your fiancée is given the absolute best care.”

In a span of fifteen minutes he had spent talking with the doctor, he had felt a mix of emotions that ranged from: anger, to scared, sick, and hurt. Why hadn’t Abbey just come home when she said she was going too? She was already exhausted- he could tell- when she got off the phone with him, but instead she had stayed even later at the office.

If she made it out of this- which she would- she was going to be receiving an earful from him about that little ‘white lie’.