Chapter 2 Chapter One

When Charles Ackland awoke he thought he had just had a dream about a trip to the dentist.Although the rest of the vision was absurd, the numbness in his mouth told him that he had been injected with the anesthetic novocaine.He lay on his back on the bed, staring at the moving ceiling, as a bell tinkled loudly behind him.Is it an alarm clock?He tried to get up to see where he was, but he pressed his hands to his chest, and a woman's face loomed in front of him.Is it a dentist?He looked at her twitching lips, but he couldn't figure out what she was going to say to him amidst the constant ringing of the bell.He wanted her to turn off the alarm clock, but wondered if others would understand him because of the novocaine injection.In any case, she would never have heard what he was saying.

Somewhere in his heart, there was a faint sense of fear that he had never felt before.For some reason, the approach of the woman in front of him worried him.He'd been lying like this before—flat on his back, unable to move—and had a strong association in his mind about pain.Soon another woman came into view, dark-haired, slender and elegant, with tears in her eyes, but Akram couldn't remember who she was.His instinctive reaction was: don't like it. His only references are the ringing alarm clock and the moving ceiling.But neither of those things meant anything to him.If it wasn't for his increasingly lucid consciousness telling him that this was not a dream, he could float forever in the hallucination caused by morphine.He began to feel a floating pleasure and excitement, a jolt of the pushcart across the threshold, a gentle tightening of the bandages as his body turned, a dull pain at the base of his jaw, a brief sharp tingle to his neck, and he Dazed and bewildered, he realized that he had only one eye open.

With a sense of dread, he realizes that he is awake... not knowing who he is, where he is, or what is happening to him... Each subsequent step of awakening increased his sense of dread.He finally understood that the ringing bell actually came from his own brain.As he regained consciousness, the ringing became bearable, but he couldn't hear what those who were staring at him were saying.Their lips moved, but he heard nothing.He didn't know if his mouth was also transmitting the signals from his brain to it.He tried to voice his fear, but he believed his lips did not move after seeing no response from the face that came up to him.

Time is meaningless.He was always drifting between conscious and unconscious, he didn't know how long he slept.He was sure it had been days, weeks since he had been brought here, and a smoldering rage began to burn inside him as consciousnesses and thoughts coalesced.Something catastrophic must have happened.He is in hospital now.Those who speak are doctors.But they weren't helping him, and they couldn't see that he was awake.He had a terrible apprehension—that he was in the hands of the enemy—why? —or, he is forever trapped in a state of paralysis that allows him to think and reason but not to communicate.

The dark-haired woman in front of him suffocated him.He hated the smell of her, hated her hands touching his skin.There she was always, sobbing, letting the tears run down her pale cheeks.Ackland was not moved by her grief, however.Intuition told him that these tears were not shed for him, she was putting on a show, and he despised her hypocrisy.He felt that he knew her, and every time he woke up and stared at her through that half-closed eyelid, a familiar feeling would come to him. He recognized his father first, and then his mother.He felt an electric shock when he realized that the tired-looking man hovering at the edge of his vision was his father.Immediately afterwards, he understood who this woman was and why her touch repelled him.Other memories came like a flood.He remembered his name, Charles Ackland, his occupation, Lieutenant in the British Army, and his last deployment, Iraq.

He had a clear memory, which he played back over and over again in his mind, because this memory gave him an explanation.He remembers boarding the RAF Hercules the day he left the UK for the Middle East.He figured the plane must have crashed on takeoff because his last memory was of buckling up his seat belt. "Charles, wake up, Charles." He felt fingers pinching his hand, "What a good boy, wake up." He opened his eyes, looked at the middle-aged nurse who was bending over him, and said, "I heard you." The words he spit out were nothing more than a long series of grunts, but he knew, he said it .

"You've had surgery and are recovering," she assumed he was asking "where am I?" "If all goes well, you'll be back in your bed this afternoon. You've got a PCA shot attached to you right now." The pump," she said, placing his left hand on the console, "is also the Patient Control Pain Syringe, which puts you in charge of your own post-op care. You won't need pain relief for a while, but if you feel Not feeling well, press this white button, and the morphine will help you fall asleep." He jerked his hand away. "It's up to you," she said lightly, "but this way you can control the pain yourself. The doses are set, and the machine will control any attempts at self-indulgence." She smiled happily. You won't stay here long enough to turn you into a junkie, Charles, trust me."

He doesn't believe it.He had a fleeting awareness that he didn't trust any women, though he didn't know why. The nurse held up a black plastic egg. "I'm going to put this in your right hand. Let me know if you can feel it." "Can." "Good job." She put his thumb on a button on top of the egg. "If you need me, press this. I'll keep an eye on you, but in an emergency, you call .You are lucky: If God had not given you a skull like a rhinoceros, you would never have survived." She was about to leave, but Aclan grabbed her skirt with the other hand, "How did it crash?"

"Say it again." He swallowed the words back to his throat like a ventriloquist, and then repeated slowly and gutturally: "Crash... crash... crash." "How did something crash?" "Plane," he tried again, "Plane, I'm flying a... plane." "You don't remember what happened?" He shook his head. "Okay, I'll get someone to explain it to you." She patted his hand again. "But don't worry, honey. You just got a few wires in your brain. It's going to be all right." Time passed slowly, and nothing happened.The nurse came back every now and then, but her smug smiles and empty comments annoyed him.Once or twice, he tried to remind her that he needed an explanation, but out of stupidity or deliberation, she just didn't understand what he was talking about, and the screams circled in his head, and he found himself speaking in an inarticulate way. Struggling angrily in the same way: everything, from this small room with the curtains drawn, to the sounds coming from outside—the low voice of conversation, the sound of footsteps, the ringing of the telephone—tangles together, advancing and rising step by step His anger.

Nurses have even lost interest.He counted the interval between her visits, 300 seconds, 400 seconds, and when the interval reached 500 seconds, he pressed his finger on the buzzer and did not let go for a long time.She ran in in a hurry, smiled stupidly, and tried to take the "plastic egg" from his hand, but he grabbed it hard and hugged it to his chest, "Fuck you!" Seeing her smile disappear, he thought, she understood this sentence. "I can't turn it off if you keep your finger on it." She pointed to the flashing red light and beeping remote receiver pinned to her belt. "If you don't let go, everyone will be led come over."

"that is good." "I'll cut the connection!" she warned. "You're not the only patient who had surgery today!" She held out her palm. "Come on, Charles. Give me a break, please? It's not my fault I haven't been here for so long. This is an NHS hospital and there's only one psychiatrist on call at the moment. He'll be here right away and you've got to trust me on that." He wanted to say that what he needed was not a psychiatrist, there was nothing wrong with his brain, he just wanted to know what was going on.Was there anyone else on the plane, are they all still alive?But he couldn't even hear his own words clearly, and it took all of his concentration to express that clearly.While he was trying to express, the nurse easily snatched the buzzer from his hand.He scolded her again. She checked the PCA syringe pump and found that he hadn't used it. "Is the pain making you so angry?" "no" She didn't believe it, "No one expects you to be a hero, Charles. It's better to sleep without pain than to be so cranky all the time and become depressed!" She shook her head, "Anyway, you shouldn't be so nervous, especially After all the pain you've been through." The psychiatrist finally came, and he gave the same evaluation to Halse, "You look more mental than I expected." He claimed to be Dr. Robert Willis, and pulled a chair over to sit on the patient. beside the bed.He looks 55 years old, thin, wearing glasses.He puts the printed medical records on his lap, and when he is not looking at them, he has a habit of looking into the patient's eyes.He first confirmed Aklan's name and military rank, and then asked him what his last memory was. "By...by...airplane." "In England?" Aclan gave a thumbs up. Willis smiled, "Okay. I think it might be better for me. We don't want to make it hard for you to talk, or for me. If you think I'm right, thumbs up Thumbs, if wrong, thumbs down. Let's start with a simple question. Do you understand what I'm saying?" He saw the lieutenant give a thumbs up. "Okay. Do you know what happened?" Akram poked his thumb repeatedly at the floor. The doctor nodded. "So let's take it slow. Do you remember arriving in Iraq? No. Do you remember anything about Iraq?" Thumb poked down repeatedly. "Nothing? Your base? Your headquarters? Your team?" Akram shook his head. "Well, then, I can only speak from the medical and corps reports that came with you, as well as the news reports I downloaded from the Internet. I will tell you as long as I know, and if there is anything that I need to repeat, please raise hand." Akland learned that he had been stationed at a British military base near Basra for the full eight weeks.There he commanded a patrol of twelve men in four Machete scout vehicles tasked with searching for insurgent gathering places along the border between Iraq and Iran.He and his armored corps conducted two reconnaissance patrols, each lasting three weeks, which the commander rated as "very successful."After a few days of rest, his team was deployed to lead reconnaissance for a convoy on the road from Baghdad to Basra.As commander, Ackland and two of his most experienced comrades - Privates First Class Barry Williams and Doug Hughes - sat in the front vehicle, which was buried by the side of the road IED attack in culvert.Two militiamen were killed in the explosion, and Aklan was thrown out of the car.All three were recommended for the Medal of Honor. Willis handed the young lieutenant a piece of paper, a typed-out news report with the headline: OUR HEROES.Next to the caption, below his graduation photo, were two other photos of two smiling men with their wives and children, with the caption: Broken families mourn their brave dad.The caption on his own photo read: Seriously Injured, But Alive. "Did you recognize them, Charles? This—" Willis touched one of the faces, "This is Barry Williams." Pointing to another face, "This is Doug Hughes." Ackram stared at the photo, trying to find something he could recall—a feature, a smile—but they looked like total strangers.He suppressed a sudden surge of panic in his heart, because if he had ever shared a cutlass with these two men on two patrols that lasted several weeks, he must know them very well.There was no way he could have forgotten them so easily, for no reason. "No." Willis, who seemed to notice his panic, told him not to worry, "You've been hit hard in the head, so it's not surprising that there's a black hole in your memory. It's usually just a matter of time and it doesn't take long to recover." of." "How...how long?" "How long? It depends on how bad your concussion is. Maybe a few days. You don't remember everything all at once...We tend to recover a little bit, but—" He broke off, Because Akram was shaking his head. "How long—" he pointed to himself, "here?" "How long have you been here?" Aclan nodded. "About 30 hours. You are now lying in a hospital on the outskirts of Birmingham. Today is Tuesday, November 28. The attack happened last Friday, you arrived here yesterday morning and you had a CAT yesterday afternoon. Scanned, had surgery this morning, left cheekbones and left browbones immobilized. All things considered you've been through," Willis smiled at him, "you're doing pretty well." Akram gave his thumbs up in agreement.But the conversation did nothing to lessen his fear and anger.How could he forget eight weeks of his own life? How did 30 hours feel like a lifetime?Why did the nurse say he had a string? What happened to him? The days that followed were difficult for Acland.He has lost count of the number of times he has been told he is lucky.Lucky he flung the car before it overturned, lucky the insurgents were too outnumbered or poorly equipped to straf him after the attack, lucky the shrapnel didn't get into his brain, lucky he still had a Can only see with one eye, luckily the blast didn't completely destroy his hearing, luckily he's still alive... For whatever reason, he was placed in a penthouse away from the other patients.Ackram suspected that his mother was doing it on purpose—she was always going to do what she wanted, to have her own way—but he didn't complain.If he had to choose between being stared at by his own parents and being stared at by anyone who came into the ward, he was more tolerant of his parents.He found, however, that the constant presence of his parents was exhausting. In this series of so-called "lucky" his father was the worst.Because he couldn't understand what his son was saying, or was too impatient to understand his son's meaning, he often stood by the window and kept repeating some words that drove Aklan crazy, such as, "God was smiling at you that day." ", "Your mother can't believe it, she almost lost you", "They told us that the situation was critical from the beginning", "This is the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me". Most of the time Akram pretended to be asleep because he was tired of the "thumbs up" game.He didn't think he was lucky, and he didn't understand why he pretended to be lucky.He is only 26 years old, and he still has a long way to go in life, but that doesn't seem to be the life he wants to choose.Every time my father mentioned the future, he would get a chill. He was really afraid. "Army offers retraining grants. How about a few years of farming? You might as well learn how to run a modern farm with taxpayers' money." Akram stared at the wall in front of him. "It was just an idea. Your mother was so desperate for you to be at home. She suggested giving you the extension to have your own space." The thought disgusted Acklan.The reason why he tolerated his mother staying in the ward was because he had no choice but to resent her endless touch on him more and more.Whenever possible, he folded his arms to avoid his mother touching his hands.He didn't know what made his mother feel that she had to treat him like a child, not to mention that she didn't seem to touch him like this when he was a child.There had never been such caresses in the Acklan family. His only respite came when medical staff took over and his parents were asked to leave.He is grateful to Mr Galbraith, the surgeon, who has been talking only about the injury and telling him what progress he can expect in the coming months.Galbraith explained that his injury was on the left side of his face, and that he had lost a significant portion of his soft tissue due to shrapnel splitting and burns, leaving his left eye beyond repair.Nonetheless, plastic surgery has advanced tremendously over the past decade thanks to microvascular technology and the use of tissue expanders, and surgical teams are very confident that they will be able to achieve good results. Galbraith reminded Acland to be mentally prepared that it may take several months to achieve the best effect.The operation will take up to 14 hours. After each operation, the patient needs a recovery period. It may be necessary to invite the assistance of experts from other departments, such as neurosurgery and ophthalmology, to evaluate and consult together.The team's goal was to minimize damage to nerve function and to find a suitable donor source so that the color and texture of the grafted skin would not be significantly different from the rest of the face, especially the reconstruction needed to install the glass eye The eyelid and eye socket tissue parts. The surgeon expected a reaction from him, but Charles didn't. "I hope this reassures you in some way, Charles," he went on. "I know it's a little hard to get you to accept so much at once, but the expectation is optimistic. When you speak more easily, you can Ask me anything you want." He stretched out a hand, "I look forward to getting to know you better." Akram grabbed his hand and would not let go, would not let the doctor go.What he wanted to say was, "Why do I need a neurosurgeon?" But it was so complicated that he put his other hand on his head and asked, "Is your brain okay?" Galbraith nodded. "At least from our point of view, no problem." He let go of the doctor's hand, "Then why don't I-remember?" "Because you were in a coma for three days, and memory loss is a common symptom of traumatic brain injury. You understand exactly what I'm telling you, right?" "yes." "You seem perfectly fine. Dr. Willis says you're pretty smart for a man who's been unconscious for three days. Do you remember talking to him?" "yes." "Do you remember the details he told you about the attack?" "yes." Galbraith laughed. "Well, you don't have to worry about it at all. It's just short-term memory loss. Patients often struggle to comprehend or retain information...they lose skills they took for granted and have to go through long periods of therapy to recover." Relearn those skills. You have partial or retrograde amnesia, which means you forget things from a certain period of time. This is very normal after a concussion...but rarely permanent." He looked at Acker Lan said with an expressionless face, "Are you relieved?" No...but the Lieutenant gave the thumbs up anyway.He couldn't expose any more anxiety and tension.If anyone knew what was going on in his head, he would have no privacy at all.