Suddenly a paramedic was beside me; I was pulled away as two firemen with tools began to work on the door of her car. I dropped the shirt and stumbled back, watching the vaguely familiar choreography of the rescue. Another paramedic came up to me and began speaking, but his words didn’t register; my mind was locked on the woman in the car, my entire being willing her to be alive.

I was holding a thin Styrofoam cup of extremely hot coffee, but the heat wasn’t registering. I was sitting in a curvy plastic chair, but the discomfort of its form wasn’t registering either. The only things that were registering were the sharp pain in my sternum from the seat belt, the ache in my neck from whiplash, and the shape of the door to the trauma room. A cop had taken my statement earlier, and I had given it as best as I could remember, although there wasn’t much I was sure of other than the fact that I got hit and now my car was in a pound somewhere, waiting for me to empty it of its contents before it was crushed and melted or stripped for its last useful parts.

I’d been there half an hour when the doctors and nurses began to trickle out of the room. No one seemed to know that I was waiting to hear what had happened, so I chased down a nurse who directed me to a doctor looking at charts at a reception desk. “I was in the accident with the woman you were working on,” I said, motioning to the trauma room from which he had just emerged. “Is she okay?”

He looked at me and then the room, and said quietly, “She probably will be. But I’m afraid I can’t discuss specifics with you unless you’re a relative.”

I shook my head. “Honestly, I don’t even know her. I just wanted to know if she’d make it or not.”

He nodded thoughtfully as he scanned the chart in his hand. “Provided she does all right for the next couple hours or so, she’ll be moved out of the ER. We have her in an induced coma, though; she won’t be talking anytime soon.”