From Fat to Skinny

November 17, Monday

Ricci is in the hospital right now.

Okay, background:

It happened today in class. Damn flag football. One minute he’s like he normally is these days: pale, tired looking, shaking; and then his eyes flutter like he’s trying to clear his head, and then he just drops to the ground like a broken marionette.

Have you ever watched someone pass out? Watched them really pass out? It’s nothing like the movies, where they fall backwards with their arms to their heads and it’s all graceful and fine because someone catches them or some shit like that.

No.

Ricci closed his eyes, tilted to the left then the right, then his knees buckled and he dropped, falling forward onto his face. I rushed to his side but Ms. Severance already reached him, checking his pulse and shouting for someone to get the nurse, and she carefully moved his limp, bony form so that he wasn’t face-first into the Astroturf.

His nose had broken in the fall. There was blood dripping out of his nostrils to coat his lips, staining them red, and there was a little puddle in the grass where his face had been. It took the nurse five minutes to get to the gym and only one minute for Ricci to wake up.

He woke up and stared blankly up at the ceiling until the nurse arrived. He didn’t really respond to questions well.

Nurse: “Do you know what happened?”

Ricci: *grunt*

And

Nurse: “What’s your name?”

Ricci: *incoherent mumbling*

The ambulance arrived another ten minutes after the nurse and by that point Ricci was a little more lucid.

Nurse: Do you know what day it is?”

Ricci: “Monday. Fuckin’ Mondays.”

When the EMTs tried to put him on the gurney and they called him Ms. Richi and that his mom would meet him at the hospital, he said he wanted me to come with him. They said no, but he got angry and then (I really never thought I’d see the day) he started to cry.

They let me ride in the ambulance with him. Ricci didn’t say a word, unless it was to answer the EMTs’ questions, the stupid ‘do you know where you are’ ones they asked to make sure he stayed awake and that he wasn’t going to slip into a coma. The whole time they called him a girl, and I could see that bugged him more than the fact that he was a walking skeleton, that he had just passed out in the middle of class, that his nose was broken...

Anyways, turns out he managed to go from 180 pounds to 89 pounds. In 85 days. The doctors said he was lucky he didn’t go into cardiac arrest weeks ago.

I can’t help but wonder: If I had just manned up and confronted him sooner, would all this have been averted?

Fuck my life.