Awareness returned in slow, fragmented form. I was lying down.
I wasn't in class anymore... The nurse's office?
Yes, that seemed right.
I seemed to be naked from the waist up, no corset, good! Yet I wasn't feeling cold at all, in fact, I was warm.
With my eyes opened, I tried to raise my head, only to hear a woman say, "stay down young man."
My brain crunched on the command and I managed to discern that the voice must belong to our school nurse, a women we all knew & to at least some degree feared, who went by the title of 'Matron'.
She was not a young woman by any stretch of the imagination, having been a nurse for something like 50 years, yet despite her advancing years she was tough as old boots and hard as nails. She was also a great nurse in the truest sense of the word, Matron cared.
She had hold of my right wrist, apparently checking my pulse. I suddenly became aware that somebody had hold of my left hand too. Turning my head to that side, I saw my best friend in the whole world, forcing a smile, with worried eyes.
"Hey Care Bear," I said.
"Hey yourself", she responded. "gave us quite the scare you know. Had to get the big medic with all the tats to carry you in here."
At this point I remembered Moose screaming as I went down so I asked Karen, "how's Moose?"
"No idea, I left straight away with you. But I bet he's not a happy camper right now."
The thought of Moose being decidedly unhappy had quite the opposite effect on us both. Seeing as he had been the cause of so much fear and bullying since we were young. Even in grade one, he seemed impossibly huge for a six year old, and with each year he got bigger and meaner. We were so grateful when they school changed the rules and allowed him to join the football team in grade 3, whilst the rest of the boys were in year 7, because it meant that he was busy with the big kids and mostly lost interest in terrorizing us.
Matron had finished taking my vitals, pulse, temperature, blood pressure O2 and jotting down the figures and was just about to leave when something about me caught her discerning eye.
Coming back over to me, she lifted my right hand again and examined it more closely, then extracting my left from Karen's grasp, she compared the two. I was still kind of out of it, so had no idea what she was looking for, when I heard Karen gasp.
"What? What's wrong, is something wrong?" I pleaded.
Before I could elicit any sort of response from either of them, Dr. Owen poked her head through the door, and addressing Karen said, "Hey Karen, I heard Jon fainted, everything OK?"
Matron motioned for her to come in closer & showed her my hands. I still didn't know what was going on, they felt fine.
Dr. Owen's face clouded almost immediately, then seemingly coming to a decision, leaned over closer to my face. "Jon, this is very important, I need you to think carefully, in the past day or two, have you received and strange phone calls?"
My first reaction was a flat no, but hen I had this vague memory of a call early this morning, there was something about bright lights?
I relayed as much as I could recall to her.
"Karen, find his phone, NOW! she demanded.
Fortunately Karen had brought our bags with her when I had been carried here. Rummaging through my bad she produced my phone and handed it straight to Dr. Owen, her Aunt.
Without a word, she quickly scanned through my call log, found the call in question and the urged Matron for a plastic bag for the phone.
In seconds she was on her own phone, speaking rapidly and with no small amount of urgency. Cars were to be dispatched immediately, medics to carry my out to the cars, something about a 'code pink' in progress.
Before Karen & I could understand what was going on, we were whisked out and into the black vehicles which had suddenly appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. I was laid on the back seat on a sedan, Karen & her Aunt went in the back of an SUV that sped along right behind us.
In less that 5 minutes, we arrived at what I would later learn, was Fem Tech head office. We were met at the cars by a gurney and two very strong men of military bearing, and in no time at all, I was in some sort of clinic or lab, Karen was holding my hand again whilst trying to stay out of the way of the dozen doctors and nurses who flooded into the room.
In moments, I was placed on a slim bed. A button was pressed and a tube of clear Perspex? came up from both sides to join seamlessly around me. The plastic tube extended from just below my chin, to my ankles. Another button brought the tube to life, suddenly there was a myriad of readouts and displays covering the tube. It reminded me of the holographic medical scanners they use on Star Trek.
When I thought of that I suddenly realized that Karen was still holding my hand, was this some sort of hologram too? It seemed so. What the hell was going on here, who were these people & what why were they so freaked out about my hands?
