He laughed softly.
“Something like that,” he replied.
“I don’t need a fucking shrink.”
“Well, let’s talk a bit, and I’ll make that call, okay?”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Thomas, you’ve been through a significant amount of trauma,” Justin said. “You’ve been an extremely active individual with the potential to play soccer professionally. That changed drastically in a very short amount of time. You’re going to have to talk about how it’s affected you.”
“How it’s affected me?” I shouted. I set my sarcasm to annihilate. “How it’s affected me? Really? Um, let’s see: I can’t walk; I’ve only been able to get myself to the john since yesterday; I can’t grope my girlfriend, and my Dad thinks I’m a fucking failure! That’s how it’s affected me. Good enough?”
He just looked at me for a moment before nodding his head.
“Yes, I do think we’ll be talking a bit more,” he said before he stood up and headed for the door. He called back over his shoulder. “We’ll have sessions for an hour every other day. I’ll have the nurse add it to your schedule.”
Fucking hell.
“One more time,” Danielle coaxed.
I took a big breath and braced my hands against the arms of the wheelchair. Sweat practically poured into my eyes, and my lungs just couldn’t seem to get enough oxygen in them. With a grunt and held breath, I lifted myself up and sideways onto the bed.
“Excellent!”
I dropped back down on my back, feeling anything but excellent, and panted like I had just finished a marathon when all I had really done was move from one spot to the other. My eyes stared blankly at the ceiling of my room as I tried to catch my breath.
“I think you’ve had enough for today,” she said.
“Are you sure?” I growled. “I’m not quite dead yet.”
She ignored my pithiness and said she’d be back in the morning. I waited until my biceps stopped burning and then pushed myself back up against the pillow.
Nicole’s pillow.
Nicole had come to the center yesterday and brought me a new pillowcase—freshly unwashed. Some people probably thought it was nasty, but I loved it. The other one was beginning to just smell like me again.
I had been at the center for four weeks. I could get myself in and out of the wheelchair, to the bathroom and back without assistance, and I could feed myself. I was off the pain meds, except for some Motrin at night sometimes, and didn’t need to be hooked up to anything anymore. It was better in that respect, but Nicole couldn’t visit me every day, and that part sucked. She came when she could, but sometimes two or three days would go by without seeing her.
Physical therapy took up most of my days, alternating between building up the strength in my arms and just trying to make my legs work at all. I could feel them, but my mind just couldn’t seem to make them work. I’d been through dozens of tests, and they kept saying there wasn’t any spinal cord damage, but aside from wiggling my toes and bending my knees just a little, I still couldn’t control them. Apparently, the doctors and experts on such things still thought my progress was good enough, and Danielle said I would probably be ready to go home in the next week.
I couldn’t decide how I felt about that.
I would be able to see Nicole every day again…in theory. At least we would be close to each other. I was pretty sure Dad was going to make that pretty fucking difficult, though. He hadn’t said a word to her in my presence, but his disdain for the girl who had cost him his soccer champion was plain to see.
He still insisted I was going to play again.
I kind of refused to think about it.
Soccer had been my life for so long, not being able to play just felt…weird—like I was in a dream or something. Well, all of this shit kind of felt like a dream, but that part especially. With the replacement shoulder blade, I didn’t have full movement of my left shoulder anymore and couldn’t raise my arm completely above my head. Even if I got full use of my legs back eventually, I wasn’t going to be able to play goal.
Okay, so maybe I thought about it a little.
I blamed that shit on Justin Hammer—my therapist.
He seemed to think I needed to talk about it all the fucking time and kept asking me how I felt about this shit and how I felt about that shit. I didn’t know how to feel and usually ended up yelling at him. He seemed to think that was all fine and dandy though. I apparently had anger issues and needed to learn to get it all out.
Fucking ridiculous.