we're on each other's team [band of brothers / hbo war]

12: the hospital

UPDATED 05/06/2022. I fleshed out the hospital experience a little bit.

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After Madison and the rest who were wounded were separated (which weren't too many) from Easy, they were dumped off at the hospital in England. Madison had spent almost two months there, recovering. Allegedly, her wounds were bad. She had a concussion, the hospital staff had to take shrapnel out of her multiple times, and she was recovering from her strangulation. In other words, she was banged up and needed some time to recover.

Recovery was boring, Madison had figured out quickly. For days—weeks—the nurses and doctors had forced her on bed rest. She hated it. She could have been with Easy somewhere, helping them, but she couldn't! Roe and Bill had forced her to go recover.

"It's not that bad," Madison would mutter angrily to herself, as she leafed through letters. Matt was on an island somewhere again. Morgan was fretting over some stupid boy. Louise seemed to be okay as well. All the letters ended the same: they missed Madison. Madison missed them, too.

Madison had a lot of time to think during recovery. She often thought about home. If Madison hadn't ever dropped out and went to Europe, she would have been graduating high school within the next year. She missed everyone back home.

She missed Louise, one of her best friends. They had known each other since she was six years old. Louise was probably the most reserved out of all their friends and was basically considered family. Then there was Margaret Wellington and her monotone voice, Gertrude Jennings and her romances, and so on.

She even missed her parents' family friends, the Summers and Veronas. Tom Summers and Alfonso Verona were Matthew, Sr.'s friends from childhood. Tom was a widow and had two children: Fred and Jean. Fred was a year older than Matt, Jr. and Jean was Madison and Morgan's age. Alfonso Verona and his wife, Florence, have two sons together: Bruno, who had a family of his own and Zachary, who was a year younger than the twins and Jean.

Of course, Madison did miss her extended family. She missed how her Opa would tease her, and how her Oma would teach her how to sew. She missed her father's embarrassing humor and her mother's constant worrying and nagging over her and her sister. She missed Matt and his goofiness (something that he inherited from their father) and Mikey's soft heart. Most of all, she missed Morgan.

Morgan was her twin and they were always together. They were together in the womb and came into the world together. They shared the same crib as infants and the same room growing up. You would rarely see one without the other and without her sister it was...well, Madison felt rather empty. It's difficult to describe. When she was with her sister, Madison felt whole but without her, she felt as if she was a glass half full. Madison often wondered if Morgan felt the same way.

That's why Madison hated spending time in recovery. She couldn't do anything and overthought everything. Buck, who was also wounded in Market Garden, tried to distract her.

"Don't worry about it, Klein. You'll get out of here soon," he gave a grin to his favorite medic.

"Where? The hospital or the front line?"

Buck's grin faltered when she said that. He watched as Madison put a cigarette in her mouth and lit it. For the longest time, Madison had never smoked. Not during training, and not after D-Day. Market Garden must have really messed with her.

"Are you alright, Klein?"

Madison took a long drag. She stared into space for a moment before she responded.

"No."

And she wasn't. Madison had begun to receive nightmares. As of now, many of them were connected to the German soldier strangling her. It wasn't pleasant, especially when she woke up and couldn't breathe. She wanted to tell someone the story, but she couldn't. She didn't know how. So, she bottled it up, and wrote it in her journal instead. When she got better, she would read letters to other recovering soldiers.