Whoever he’d been expecting to walk through the door, it obviously wasn’t me.
“Hi, Mia,” I said, holding up both hands in a universal ‘I mean no harm’ gesture. “I’m not sure if you remember me.”
“You…” Mia started but then had to pause to wet his lips with his tongue. “Told stories.”
His words were overly simple, but each one sounded like it took him a lot of effort to say.
Still moving slowly, I sat down in the chair next to the bed. “That’s right. I visited you many times to read stories to you while you were asleep. And I was here when you woke up. The nurses said that you’ve been really upset since waking up, and that you asked for me. Is there anything I can do to help… whatever’s upsetting you?”
A look of deep concentration descended upon Mia’s face. He tried to speak several times, but no intelligible sounds would come out, like the words were stones lodged in his throat.
It was surprisingly similar to interviewing an uncooperative witness. Without even realizing, I snapped into detective mode, looking over Mia with a more critical eye, and several details became instantly clear.
Mia’s eyes were sharp. He was focused and could clearly follow everything I said. His inability to speak wasn’t a cognitive issue. The mind inside the body was functioning. Rather, it seemed he was physically struggling to form his mouth into the words he wanted.
Growling in frustration, Mia eventually waved a wild hand at the door.
“They! Drugs!” Then with that same hand he slapped himself in the chest. “Me! Bad!”
The combination of gestures and broken words reminded me of my time serving overseas. More often than not, I didn’t speak the native language of the country I was stationed in, and translators were not as readily available as they should have been. I frequently ended up playing a very similar game of charades with the locals whenever I needed information about an area,and I’d gotten rather good at piecing whole sentences together from very few words.
“The nurses gave you drugs,” I summed up. “And you don’t like that.”
Mia’s wild gesture with his arm also drew my attention to several new spots of red staining the bandages along his forearm. I’d spent enough time staring at his unconscious form that I knew the exact condition of his injuries. These bandages were fresh, and this blood was even fresher. He’d been injured recently, probably sometime after he’d woken up.
Without thinking, I reached for his arm.
The moment he saw my hand coming toward him, he flinched back as if I’d struck him, clutching his arm close to his chest.
Realizing my mistake, I immediately froze.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you. I just realized you are inured. Can I see? I promise, I won’t do anything. I won’t even touch you if you don’t want.”
Sharp eyes regarded me for several moments, but then Mia relaxed and held out his arm toward me. He even let me pull the bandages back enough to see the skin underneath.
There were several small but angry looking wounds on his arm, clustered near the crook of his elbow. I’d seen these kinds of wounds before, and another piece of the puzzle clicked into place in my mind.
“You tore your IV out. Several times, by the looks of it. Is it because you didn’t like the drugs they were giving you?”
Pulling his arm back toward his chest, Mia pressed a hand over the wounds near his elbow, then nodded.
I leaned back in my chair, waiting to see if the other man would manage to wrangle up any more words. He opened and closed his mouth a few times, but even that seemed to take effort, and in the end, he just huffed in frustration and scowled at the IV drip that was still hanging near the bed.
It looked like I was going to have to do all the talking for him.
“In my experience, there are only two types of people who oppose doctor recommended medication that strongly.”
I spoke slowly to make sure Mia was following me. He still looked frustrated, but his eyes remained sharp and stared at my mouth like he was reading the words directly from my lips.
“The first are insufferable know-it-alls who think they know better than the doctors after a few minutes of Google searching. The second are people who already have a bad history with certain drugs.”
I regarded him for a moment, and he seemed to sense my scrutiny because he sat up straighter.
“You don’t seem like a know-it-all. So, what drugs were you on?”
Mia swallowed a few times and I could almost hear the sound of his throat muscles working.
“Pain,” he eventually managed to say.