Here is a non-fiction creative narrative which I originially wrote over a year ago and has just recently been revised.

I hope you enjoy it.

Making
Ben Fouquette

“If we tell you to breathe, make sure you do,” said the young nurse, whose name I would never know. Odd, I thought to myself, that I would need a reminder to breathe.
I lay prone atop an operating table that seemed too small to fit its purpose. My feet almost dangled off the edge, while its width barely supported the broader regions of my upper body. My only comfort came in a flattened, Abbot-Northwestern issue pillow to lay my head on.
Nurses and physician’s assistants created a flurry of activity throughout the room, scurrying from monitors to bags of morphine, destined to enter my bloodstream through an IV drip. And it couldn’t come soon enough.
Unfortunately, morphine and I don’t mix. We’re like Mentos and Pepsi; mix and wait for the explosion of projectile fluid-Red Jell-O and beef brother projectile that didn’t look or taste as good coming up as it did going down. But I could deal with puke. What I had no intention of remembering or feeling was the operation that awaited me.
The battle pitted me and a team of doctors against a three-inch long mass of platelets, red cells, white cells, and fibrin lodged in a major vein of my shoulder. It was kicking my 5’11”, 185-pound frame square in the ass-beating me up physically and, in some regard, mentally.
Neatly situated in my subclavian vein, the blood clot formed as a result of an effort thrombosis; doctor talk for a vein pinching between a rib and an enflamed muscle. The blood flow out of my left arm had stopped completely. Blood ran in, but didn’t run out. The rare disorder caused my arm to balloon to nearly twice its usual size. From the base of my shoulder to the tips of my fingers, my arm felt like rock-a bulging, swollen, discolored rock that trembled with pain after each breath.
Needless to say, the discomfort of vomiting paled in comparison to the alternative. I was ready, ready to float away from any sense of consciousness, or worry, or even thought. I was ready for 10 milligrams of morphine to pass from syringe to bloodstream to insensible bliss. But I wasn’t ready for what was to come; not for the vivid images, sounds and feelings that would constrict my very thought. I wasn’t ready for the fear. And most of all, I wasn’t ready to feel my life drift dangerously close to its end.

The nurse gently tapped the end of the narcotic-filled needle, scattering a few tiny droplets into the air. She inserted the needle into the IV tube protruding from my wrist. Pressing thumb and ring finger together, she shot what I thought would be some sort of liquid salvation into my system.
“We’ll give that some time to kick in and then we’ll go ahead and get started, dear, “she said.
I managed a wry smile. In a few short minutes I figured to be flying as high as a Grateful Dead fan at a reunion concert.
Shortly after, almost as if on cue, my thought did begin to expand. Not into some mind-blowing matter, but simply to the past.
I began to think about how I had ended up in this medical mess during the last week of my junior year of high school. Here I lay practically bed-ridden, when just three days prior the hopes of the Buffalo Bison baseball team had been heaped onto my shoulders-my left shoulder in particular-as we were tangled in the thick of the Section 5AA tournament.
Our coach called it “the biggest game this program has played in a long, long time,” and there I was, mired in what I deemed to be a season-long underachieving slump. However, my confidence belied my season statistics. I wanted nothing more than to be standing on the mound when the number-one-seeded Hutchinson Tigers came to call. I felt without a doubt that number nine, with the mop-top of auburn curls was primed to thoroughly dominate these boys from Hutch in front of their sizable home crowd.
In the bullpen my stuff was sharp. It bit and snapped and jumped from my hand. It popped loudly in the catcher’s mitt--music to my ears.
My counterpart from Hutch quickly handled our first three hitters and I headed onto the field with clear intentions of matching his scoreless inning. A sweat droplet burned my eye as I peered in to received the first sign. Fastball. I kicked and threw, emitting what I thought to be pure heat from the tips of my fingers.
I first heard the ting of aluminum meeting cowhide and then heard the baseball whistle past my left ear and into centerfield.
I gulped.
Slightly relieved that the ball had failed to fracture either cheek or jaw, I attempted to regain the stellar confidence I had felt just moments before. Three batters and one hanging curveball later, my visions of grandeur were disappearing in a dust cloud of base runners and disappointment.
Score at the end of the first, Buffalo, 0. Hutchinson 3.
I thought this was just the next chapter of lopsided defeat in a veritable novel of losing. But I was wrong. Fight remained in the boys from Buffalo. We clawed, scratched, and scrounged our way to a 3-3 tie, with me holding their suddenly silent offense at bay. The hometown crowd grew tense, their bellows of excitement had become whispers of concern and I was feeding off of that fear. Something was simmering in me, ready to boil over with the midday sun. I was angry and I didn’t even know why. I threw every pitch with a hint of malice behind it. I glared at every hitter wanting to break his self-confidence down to a level it had never ventured. And then it dawned on me. The self-doubting, overly cautious side of me had, for the first time, taken a back seat to an ultra-competitive force, brimming with testosterone and an unwillingness to back down from anyone.
In the bottom of the sixth with two outs, Hutch pushed across the go-ahead run. As the blur of yellow and white slid safely past the tag, I screamed. I screamed with an animalistic-nature that emanated from some primal place that I hadn’t known existed within my self.
We had lost.
Not until the following morning did I feel the tightness, the tingling, the symptoms of something far more serious than a section loss.

My eyes bulged as the shooting sensation of pain brought me reeling back from my daydream, body-slamming me back onto the cold discomfort of the operating table. The procedure to dissolve the clot in my left shoulder was underway and had taken an unexpected turn. The plan had called to blast clot-breaking medicine at the affected area through a catheter based near my elbow. The plan wasn’t working. The clot wasn’t cooperating.
The ache that had inhabited my shoulder now stretched to my toes. It throbbed at the rhythm of a club smashing a drum. Each beat louder, deeper. Barely audible over the pounding that existed solely between my ears was the voice of Dr. Murray, the interventional radiology specialist, the man standing between me and a great unknown.
“Ben, listen to me, we need you to stay awake. Do not fall asleep,” he said.
My head wavered, my eyes swam. I began to sense a deep swell of coldness in my chest. It was so cold it burned. The sensation crept outward into my throat and through my nasal passages. My chest felt empty-only the coldness existed, nothing else.
“Breathe, Ben, breathe,” said Dr. Murray.
I tried. Nothing. I tried again. Still nothing.
With every attempt to inhale I felt like I was choking on my tonsils. Unbeknownst to me, the clot had spread. The mass that was three inches was now twelve. The situation that was once serious was now no less than dire.

My eyes lost focus, rolling back into their sockets. Rational thought escaped me. And then, when any and every sliver of hope had evaded me . . . air. Warm, life-giving air-filling my lungs and replenishing my lease on life.
I would be wheeled out of that operating room, without even the ability to lift my head off the hospital-issue pillow. My eyes felt as if they were sunk deep into their sockets, like all the air around me had become heavier, pushing down on my feeble body.
But my blood was pumping again, circulating strength into my body. Days later I would shower for the first time in over a week. That same blood, caked onto my skin around a pair of new, four-inch scars, washed off my chest, ran down my leg, and created a red pool around the drain of the shower. I watched as it slowly disappeared. Part of me gone, the rest left here, standing under a stream of steaming water.
No one will ever have to remind me to breathe again.