"A Sanctuary Safe and Strong"(Marianas Trench)

Chapter 37

Once they arrived at the hospital, the singer limped through the front door. The unexpected jolt on the ride over had caused him a little more pain than he'd originally realized, though he hadn't figured that out until he had to ask for Matt's help getting out of the car. Fortunately for Josh, the younger man wasn't the type to hold a grudge and offered his hand, allowing the blond to ease himself out as slowly as he needed. Better yet, Matt was just as willing to allow the singer to drape his arm across him and use him as a human crutch all the way through the parking garage and into the lobby. 

The visit to the hospital turned out to be much more involved than either man had anticipated. It took forty-five minutes of sitting in the lobby and staring that the clock on his cell phone before he was seen, but during the recheck appointment with the doctor who had initially treated Josh when he'd first shown up the night he'd been wounded, the sutures in the back of his head and shoulder were carefully snipped out, and, despite looking vaguely like raw meat as Josh had thought of his shoulder earlier, he was assured that everything was healing just as well as to be expected. The singer was able to have his pain medications refilled for the ribs, which still had several more weeks to go before they were fully healed. But at least he could kiss the antibiotics and whatever the hell else he had to swallow twice daily goodbye. From there, his doctor sent him to have repeat shoulder and chest x-rays, "Just to make sure everything on the inside is healing as well as it is on the outside," Josh was told. 

What was supposed to take no more than twenty minutes in radiation lasted two hours. The singer's doctor hadn't been aware that there were fifteen other people ahead of him in line for x-rays, several of which were comparative emergencies that took for-fucking-ever, in Josh's opinion. The nurse was as apologetic as she could be, telling him to have a seat and that the technician would get to him as soon as possible, but she couldn't be sure when that would be. So Josh sat in a standard-issue plastic chair with his back to the wall, watching as people came and went - some in white coats, some in green scrubs, some in hospital gowns. Just as he thought he would go out of his mind, the repetitive tapping of his fingers against his legs as he waited driving even himself crazy, the nurse came to get him and lead him down a long dim hallway and into a small room with a lot of equipment he couldn't remember seeing before. Of course he couldn't, he was unconscious when he was first brought in. 

Fifteen minutes after he'd gotten a couple waves of radioactive particles sent through his body, the x-rays were sent to his doctor to look over. Half an hour after that, his doctor had dropped in to check them over and declared Josh to be healing well and should recover fully. From there, he was shipped off to physical therapy on the opposite side of the building. More waiting. As a new patient, he had to first spend a good twenty minutes filling out paperwork. The blond wrinkled his nose a bit when he saw how much worse his handwriting had actually gotten over the last week and a half that he hadn't been able to pick up a pen. He hadn't known that was actually possible, he realized as he scrawled his now completely illegible signature across the bottom of the last page of forms before handing them over to the receptionist. 

His physical therapist, Brittany-call-me-Britt, a seemingly sweet natured young woman in her early twenties came to get him from the waiting room and brought him back into a room where she sat him on what was some kind of naugahyde covered work out bench that looked like it should be found at a gym. Well, Josh supposed that made sense. This place was gym-like, he noticed, looking around at all the equipment in the room.  

Britt took several minutes explaining what she would be doing to him, and to Josh, it sounded like just this side of torture, and that's how it felt when she started to manipulate his shoulder, stretching it and pulling the muscles until he thought she was going to rip his whole goddamn arm right off. By the end of the hour long session, Josh had only uttered the word "fuck" thirty-two times. He knew because he'd counted. He'd also refrained from hauling off and hitting her after she had insisted that he pull on some goddamn rubber band to test his strength "one more time" when he'd been so over the whole thing at least twenty minutes prior.