Chapter 29

Saturday, January 29th, 2022
Colorado Springs, Colorado

Carl woke me as a nurse named Pam was just coming in to do another check on me. I had my eyes open when she leaned over me so I could see her and said, “Good morning, how are we feeling today?”

I tried to say, “Good morning,” but what came out was something more like “Ooh or ann.”

She perked up and was smiling brightly as she said, “Well well well, look who’s trying to talk. That’s awesome John. Let me prop you up. Do you need anything before I pass along this change to your doc?”

I said, “oh” and blinked twice.

She replied, “Okay, back in a bit.”

Later in the morning, after lot’s of excited visits from staff and a few other docs. My own doctors were thrilled with the progress and very upbeat, but gave warnings to not try to strain myself. Especially in the area of breath control and speaking. Slow steady progress would be better than dealing with setbacks due to injury to weak vocal cords. I agreed, as going slow was built into the plan anyway.

I kept with the plan to have no control of my jaw yet, and minimal tongue control all day. The doctors of course noticed and commented on it, plus the fact that I could now feel the poking and prodding everywhere, even though I couldn’t move anything but the tongue and eyes yet.

John Sr. came by before lunch and had a lot of pictures of young John among mostly family members while growing up. Pictures with cousins, Aunts and Uncles, and a few childhood friends. Most of his childhood friends went their own way after high school. His college years were at Mays Business School at Texas A&M, and all he brought back from there was heartache apparently.

There was a picture of a fiancée who supposedly had made a change of heart a couple months before the wedding. That was the official position. John Jr. didn’t talk to his father about it, but John Sr. suspected someone was caught having an affair. He never understood why all the details were kept quiet. Junior switched between being very angry, and very depressed for quite a while after that. John felt his son was angry with himself more than anyone else, but couldn’t say why he felt that way.

He never quite fit into the management position in the family business. The mood swings tapered off after about a year, but he never got close with anyone at work, as far as his father knew. On the business front, young John never took charge of any project, being content to let his team do as they thought best for the most part. He was highly organized but supposedly struggled with making any decisions tougher than what to have for lunch, according to rumors.

For tomorrow, I asked John Sr. to focus on the people who were in his son’s life in the last couple years since he returned from college. I was hoping to see a picture of anyone likely to come up to me, and who would reasonably expect me to know who they were. I knew I could play it off as if I was still dealing with the aftermath of the coma, but it would be best to be as prepared as possible.

I also brought up the apartment at one point while we were alone.

“You know, when I checked out his place the other day, I was looking through his bills and did not see his rent payment. I’m worried because it’s nearly the end of the month.”

He chuckled and said, “Well, he doesn’t actually pay rent. He insisted on paying the utilities, but I own the building, and I have him living there nominally as another point of contact for the other tenants. He gets to live there as compensation for keeping an eye on things for me. There is an actual manager who handles everything needed officially though. I’ll check into it and make certain there are no service interruptions.”

Carl continued practicing with telekinesis and scanning things throughout the day. There was actually one very interesting, game changing really, thing which he found all on his own. He realized that when he was touching someone, whether with the scanning method or the TK (telekinesis) method, it worked the same way as my touching someone when drawing power.

Now he could begin a pull on anyone, whether they were already aroused or not. As a side effect, he would make them less disgusted, and even move them into the aroused side of the scale as he kept pulling. Anyone within range was suddenly a potential donor and Carl could maintain a mild state of arousal indefinitely, while they hardly even noticed. I’d probably still go sometimes, but strip clubs weren’t my only easy source for power anymore. I just needed people.

It also meant that Carl could induce a mind melting orgasm on anyone in range at any time. I’m sure we wouldn’t abuse that power, too much. I spent some time imagining having that ability when we dealt with the gunman at the store. Use TK to point the gun upwards and have him blow into his shorts with no warning.

Would the power affect men the same? I suspected it could happen. I had one memorable orgasm in my early days where I came very close to passing out from it. We would have to do some testing on that. There were a couple men walking through here during the day, but most of them were visitors. Only janitorial staff and doctors otherwise, or at least, if there was a male nurse on this floor, I hadn’t met him yet.

Maybe next time Doctor Carter came by I’d take the time to recruit him too and we could do some testing. I probably should have done it already but it hadn’t been necessary up to this point, and I leaned toward wanting less team members if I could help it. I suspected it would be completely fine, but it was at least possible that my commands were having further reaching effects than I intended.

Sam brought a handful of new medical books and she seemed to be in a better overall mood today. I’d ask her about it again another time. She was actually feeling a little frisky, because she fully reclined my bed and took me into her mouth for a lovely bit of relief. Carl had no trouble keeping her on the high end of the arousal scale and she had one hand very busy in her own pants throughout the process. She came when he rattled the closed bathroom door at a high point. Apparently, unlike Meghan, she did have at least a little exhibitionist in her psyche.

Sunday, January 30th, 2022
Colorado Springs, Colorado

I woke in the morning and Carl and I discussed giving me limited control of facial muscles and much more control of my tongue. We left the neck muscles out of it for now, maybe we’d add them later in the afternoon.

When I heard Pam come in today I was smiling at the ceiling. I said, “Guh Mornen Pam.”

She let out a little yip and said, “Woo hoo, Listen to you!.” She leaned over and kissed my cheek and said, “I’m so happy for you. Let’s get you sitting up and I’ll look over the vitals for the chart.”

After situating me and checking things over, she left to report in. Doctor Carter joined a couple other visitors about a half hour later and went through a full checkup with me. After clearing the room and satisfying himself with my condition. We got to talking.

In the beginning each word was a struggle, it got better though. He asked expected questions for the most part.

“What are your most recent memories before waking up here in the hospital?”

“In the garage. Lots of coughing. Wake up, this is a bad idea, but my hands were not working. Can’t open the door. Passed out.”

He asked, “Okay, mental health check time. Do you remember why you chose to put yourself in that position?”

I said, “Felt unworthy of everything. Tired of not being good enough. Sick of disappointing people. I had a meeting coming up, where I would have to explain failing yet again, and I was just done.”

“Has anything changed for you?”

I said, “I feel pretty dumb for hurting myself when I could have just run away to a new life. Instead, I picked a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Feels stupid now, but all I could see at the time was a lack of options.”

He smiled at me and said, “I understand the feeling, even if I’ve never been quite in your shoes. I would like you to talk to someone for me along the way, in the meantime I want you to just try to stay focused on your recovery. It looks like your brain is trying to remember how to do things, or form new ways to do them again. I’m going to send in a physical therapist to look you over and if nothing else go over your body and articulate your limbs safely. Do you have questions for me?”

“Yes, now that I can use my mouth again, when do you see us moving to something like solid foods again?”

He replied, “I would say let’s give it a few days first to see how you are progressing. Then we can look at taking out that feeding tube that’s running into your nose and down to your stomach. Once we do that we’ll perform some swallow tests to ensure things are working properly in the throat area and then we move to what we call, ‘more solid liquids’ first. So don’t expect cheeseburgers anytime soon. I would also like to schedule an MRI at some point. So we can really see what’s going on in there.”

Sam and I had gone through a couple MRI scans in testing and had agreed we would just do it as a normal version of John, and I would just stay still for it. It was possible for disconnected nerves to show and we didn’t want that to be seen in the real scans. I wasn’t worried.

John Sr. came back and was very pleased with the progress. I had a niggling thought that I wanted to get his take on.

“John, what is your family’s take on same gender relationships?”

He replied, “There is nobody that falls in that camp to my knowledge, but I would like to think of the family as tolerant, if not necessarily accepting.”

I said, “Let’s not dance around this. How would you have acted if you learned John liked men?”

He sat there and slowly let his gaze fall to the floor. “Probably not well. Producing an heir was something he grew up being told was an expectation. I never saw any signs that he might lean that way, but to be honest I probably did not look at it very closely. I wouldn’t have wanted to know that, if it were true. Is that what you think this was about?”

I replied, “I have no idea if it was a factor or not. I never met the man, and I’m only getting a small glimpse of his life. I’ve heard nothing that says it directly, so it’s nothing but a wild guess that fits some clues. I could look into it if you would like me to, but we’ll probably never know how much it played into his actual decision that day. His ex might be able to tell us more about what really happened to them, but whatever happened way back then ended years ago.”

He was lost in thought for a while then said, “If you ever find out more, I would like to know about him. Regardless of what you learn, please share it with me.”

He left soon after that. Sam caught me in the afternoon on her rounds. We discussed allowing small head movements tonight and some finger twitches tomorrow. She got into her family drama a bit, in that it was about a sister who was headed into rehab because her life was spinning out of control. She also brought two other books to add to the pile by the bed.

Once she was gone, I heard Carl open the book and start turning the first few pages and I asked, [Hey, can you focus on an individual page while the book is closed?”

He sent, [Let’s see, ] and I heard the book close.

After a minute he replied, [I can, and it is easy enough to see individual words on pages if it’s just text, but as there is no light I can’t see pictures very well at all. Gradients of color are too mixed up to easily differentiate the page from the ink. Most photos, or even some multicolor illustrations are pretty much just blobs. However a line illustration or diagram is typically completely legible. It’s also a lot of work, focusing on the individual page, orientating it properly, then superimposing the attached text of just one color/type. It’s much easier, with a better end result, to just flip the page open.]