George Wilson looked down at Pia lying in the hospital bed and felt sick to his stomach. When he received word of what had happened some forty-eight hours after the event, thoughtfully sent along by Zach Berman through Whitney Jones, he dropped everything, made a plea to his chief of radiology about having to attend to another family emergency, this time relatively for real, and rushed straight to Boulder. Since he had arrived two days previously, he hadn’t left the hospital once, and had only slept fitfully for forty-five minutes at a time slouched in a backbreaking hospital room chair.

George’s mind kept sliding back to the time he and Pia had stood in a different hospital room, in New York, watching their fellow medical student Will McKinley fight for his life. McKinley was still worrisomely ill with a recalcitrant, antibiotic-resistant infection in his skull. Even though George had been told that Pia’s injuries now weren’t life threatening like they were initially, he couldn’t help but think of Will and how close he and Pia had come to being in a permanent state of limbo, hanging between life and death. Head injuries could be like that.

Pia had been severely injured. She had fractured her left arm in two places, mid-humerus and radius, and four ribs. The ribs were apparently from the steering wheel. As the roof of the car had compressed when the vehicle rolled over, Pia received a serious blow to the head and a resultant concussion, and her neck was badly strained with bleeding into the para-spinal muscles, so she was wearing a neck brace. She had suffered some internal injuries as well, trauma that couldn’t be seen but was more life threatening than the broken bones and cuts and bruises, a very familiar sight to George. The blunt force of the crash and probably the steering wheel had ruptured Pia’s spleen, causing blood to pump into her abdominal cavity, and without the rapid response of an ambulance and EMTs from this same hospital, Pia could well have bled to death as she lay unconscious in the wreckage of her new automobile. Luckily they had accurately diagnosed the problem and had alerted the ER so that when she had arrived, she was taken almost directly to surgery to stem the bleeding. There was no doubt it had saved her life.

Pia was still currently in a drug-induced coma to allow the swelling of her brain to subside, and was being artificially respired to make sure she got full aeration of her lungs. To monitor this, she was given round-the-clock nursing care. George understood all this, but he was desperate for Pia to wake up so that he could hear her voice, but he knew he had to be patient, and he was learning that that was a virtue he had in short supply. There was nothing he could do, and he hated the feeling of powerlessness.