Sarah's Trust

The doctor had just entered the room when Sarah began to stir. Her fingers twitched to begin with before she began feeling the bed she was lying on. Before she could begin to freak out, the doctor decided to speak.

"Sarah, how are you feeling?" he asked her carefully.

She moved her head sharply to the sound, trying to locate where it was coming from. "Where am I?" she asked.

"You're in the hospital, Sarah," he told her. "I'm going to check your injuries, okay?" She nodded slowly and he approached her. He pulled a small medical torch from his pocket and held it up to her face then with one hand he opened her right eye and shone the light into it. This made the girl jerk her head suddenly.

"Where's that light coming from?" she asked frantically, not quite sure what was going on.

The doctor seemed puzzled for a moment and he repeated the action with her left eye, gaining the same reaction. "Sarah, can you open your eyes for me?" he asked her.

She seemed confused for a moment before she slowly her eyes. Her head whipped around the place and the doctor didn't like that one bit. "What do you see?" he questioned.

For a moment it was completely quiet until she let out a scared sound. "I can't see anything," she whispered. "What's wrong with my eyes?" The doctor straightened up and went to the end of her bed, pulling her clipboard away from where it was clipped. "Are you still there?" she questioned.

"I'm going to go get your parents now, okay? I won't be long," he explained to the girl before leaving the room and going to contact her parents. It wasn't even ten minutes later that they were entering the hospital and searching for the doctor. When they found him, her father asked him whether they could see her. He sighed before he answered them.

"It seems that the head injury was more damaging than we first thought," he told them. He knew that he couldn't tell them anything for sure until he conducted further testing on Sarah's eyesight.

Her father, a fifty three year old man who treated his sixteen year old daughter like she was a child, squeezed his wife's hand lightly when the doctor spoke. "What does that mean? What's wrong with our daughter?" he asked.

"It's possible that the occipital lobe in her brain suffered a more devastating blow that we first thought because Sarah seems to be unable to detect anything other than light," he explained to her parents. It was better to explain to the parents before the teenager because it would be easier for them to take because they weren't the ones who had the possibility of being permanently blind for the rest of their life.

It took a few seconds for them to take in the information before her mother spoke. "You mean that our daughter is...blind?" she choked up, placing a hand up to her mouth in horror.

He nodded. "It seems to be a good chance, yes."

Both parents looked at each other for a moment in shock before heading towards the room that their daughter was lying in. Sarah was sitting up in the bed, her hands tracing over the blanket that was over her legs as she tried to work out how come she couldn't see anything.

"Oh, Sarah," her mother exclaimed before she rushed over to her daughter and enveloped her in a big hug. Her father stayed near the doorway, not able to go near his daughter just because he didn't want her to know just how devastated he was about her accident and what they were going to have to tell her.

"Mum," Sarah mumbled into her mother's shoulder. "I can't see anything." Tears seeped into her eyes and a few trailed down her face and landed in her mother's hair.

Both her mother and father looked at each other when their daughter said those words. Their eyes were having a conversation, seeing which one of them would be able to break the news to their daughter that she might not be able to see again. After a few seconds of constant eye contact, her mother let go of her daughter only for her father to cross the room and sit in the chair next to the bed, pulling his daughter's hands into his.

"Sarah, honey, you were in an accident," he began slowly, taking a deep breath. She nodded, tightening her hands around her father's. "You've sustained a head injury, and the doctor thinks that you...that you might have been made blind from the injury." As he said the last word, Sarah's lip started to quivered. Immediately he pulled her into a hug, allowing his daughter to cry into his shoulder.

Her mother watched from the other side of the bed, tears evident in her eyes as well. What did her daughter ever do to deserve something like this? She took in the appearance of the teenager. A small patch bandage was on her forehead from the cut she had sustained, there were scrapes on her face and up her arms and, from what she knew the moment she had been told her daughter was in an accident, there was a bandage around her stomach as she'd punctured it on something when she landed in the street. Thankfully, nothing was damaged internally – except, of course, her vision. That was also on the outside.

The doctor came back into the room and explained everything to Sarah and her parents, watching as the girl tried to fight the tears. After he had explained everything, he asked her parents to step out for a moment so he could test her eyes some more. Her results came back the same as what he had thought: Sarah had damaged her lobe too much and she had lost almost all her vision, only being able to tell the difference from light and dark and whenever there was a light source, something that was demonstrated when he had first shone the light into her eyes.

It was after finding out for sure that he then had to explain what would happen now with her parents. He explained that Sarah would find it increasingly difficult to do mundane things that most people often took for advantage on her own, and that she would need help for the first few weeks to walk around and find everything again now that she didn't have her sight. He encouraged them to get her a white cane, something that would help her be able to navigate her way all by herself, and to provide her with blacked out glasses for her eyes. He also told them to give her a lot of support but at the same time allow her to be as independent as she can be as she grows more used to not being able to rely on her sight.

Sarah was kept in the hospital for a few more days for observation before she was discharged and taken back home by her parents. It was set up that Sarah would go back see a doctor that specialised in eye care every two weeks. The doctor would examine her eyes each time and then she would spend an hour of therapy with the doctor to help improve her abilities without her vision.

All in all, that was the worst week of her life.