Chapter 2: What Happened?

“He’s opening his eyes!” Jenna squealed into the phone. “What should I do?”

Sometimes, I worry about my sister.

I mean, I really love her. She is only six minutes older than me and a real brainiac. She is the one that always blew the curve for the rest of the class. And she’s the one who made all my teachers speculate on whether I was adopted. Jenna was about to graduate high school with a super-high GPA. High enough to be valedictorian of our class, and high enough to earn a full scholarship to Georgia Tech. Without a doubt, one of the smartest people I know, and yet...

... And yet sometimes she could be so obtuse.

She paused for just a moment.

“Okay. First, I’ll call the nurse. Then, call Mom,” she repeated. “Are you sure Mom won’t be upset that it’s so late?

I figured she was talking to Kelly Ann, my eldest sister and a freshman at the University of Georgia. I’m not sure what her major is, but so far, it seems to be mostly boys and parties.

“You’re right, Kelly Ann! After all ... he is finally waking up.”

The next few hours were both hectic and hazy. First came a stream of nurses and technicians, followed shortly by a couple of the on-call doctors, then my parents, and finally, near sunrise, my family doctor and a couple of specialists, a neurosurgeon and a burn specialist.

Through it all, I begin to piece together what had happened. Evidentially, I had been hit by lightning.

Jenna described to me how I had been unconscious when another golfer found me shortly after the lightning strike. My left palm had some very painful second-degree burns, probably from where it was resting on the clubs in my bag, while there was some minor first degree burns under my arm and on my ribcage from how I was carrying my bag.

My dad explained how my bag was gone. Disintegrated. And the clubs inside it fused into a molten mass of twisted metal. Even the rubber spikes on the bottom of my golf shoes had melted. But the biggie, the thing I was having the hardest time accepting, was that today was March 21st.

I had been in a coma for ten days!

By the time my doctor, Dr. Peterson, arrived, I was sitting up in bed, with the bandages on my left hand freshly re-wrapped and a partially empty breakfast tray on the rolling table beside my bed.

“Welcome back, Alex,” Dr. Peterson said, smiling. “You gave us quite the scare.”

Then, after introducing the two specialists, they all went to work, prodding and poking. They gave me a sedative that they said might make me sleepy, then began hooking me up to various machines. The burn specialist checked my hand and under my arm and then left without a word. Dr. Peterson left shortly thereafter, promising to be back tomorrow. The neurosurgeon grunted a couple of time as he examined the EKG and then ordered a battery of tests before disappearing.

Then the techs with their myriad machines rolled in and the serious testing began. Somewhere in all that, my dad left to take my sister to school, and I finally dozed off.

I woke when the room suddenly became still as all the tech weenies disappeared about lunchtime. That left just my mom and me.

“How are you holding up, Sweetheart?” she asked. “Are you hungry?”

“I think I’m okay. I feel a little funny, like I’m about to start floating, but I’m not. And yeah, I’m a little hungry,” I told her. “Any idea what they’re looking for? And when do I get to go home?”

“A little. It seems that when they did an MRI on you, the second day you were in the hospital, you somehow fried their machine. The hospital was very upset, and the doctors were very confused,” she said, hesitantly.

“I fried it?”

“Yes. And a lot of their machines will not work on you, so they have to find alternative ways of testing. That’s why they slightly sedated you this morning before they started testing. And that’s not all.”

“It’s not?”

“It seems that cell phones will not work around you,” she added. “It’s all very confusing.”

“That’s weird,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“They wanted to transfer you to the University of Georgia Research Hospital in Athens to do more testing, but your father and I have said no,” she revealed. “At least for the time being. So that’s why they called in Dr. Weinstein. He’s the head of neurology at Emory.”