Write me a Letter

ambulances, sirens wailing, screeched into the parking lot and pulled up. Out jumped the paramedics.
    ”Him first,” I said when the first one reached me and Benny. He took one look, ran back to the ambulance, and returned with a pile of absorbent pads of some kind. He said I could take my hand away now. I did. He slapped the pads on, over the shirt, held them with one hand, opened one of Benny’s eyes with the other, had a look, then called his pal over, who took over the job of holding the pads in place while the medic got a shot of something into Benny. I couldn’t see what the guys from the second ambulance were doing during all this, but a minute later they showed up wheeling a stretcher, lowered it, got Benny onto it with one practiced movement, and off they went. The medic turned his attentions to me.
    ”Gun shot?” he said, loudly and clearly, his head down next to mine. He looked about sixteen.
    ”Unh-uh,” I said. ”Back. Fell on it. Can’t move. Hurts like fuck.”
    ”Right,” he said. Out came another needle. He slapped it into me. Almost immediately the stuff hit. I was suffused with warmth and love and truth and beauty, I knew the secret at last!
    ”Mighty good dope, Doc,” I said sleepily, grinning foolishly at him. ”Don’t forget to write me out a repeat prescription later.”
    ”Sure, tough guy,” he said. Then it was my turn to get hoisted onto the stretcher and wheeled to the ambulance and then up and in.
    ”Whee!” I said happily. ”Whee whee!”
    Off we went, a cop car following us. They took us to the nearest hospital that was both open at that hour and had emergency facilities, which turned out to be St. Helen’s in Sac, I remember the medic telling me just before I smilingly went down to visit the sandman. The sandman was home. He was thrilled to see me again. He tucked me into his coziest bed, brought me a glass of wa-wa, made sure I had my teddy, and then kissed me good night.
    Then came morning, corset, cop, and nurse, as described. Then came me not moving, waiting for God in the form of Dr. Imre, and God-knew-what in the form of some nameless lieutenant.
    The doctor was the first to show, the humorless nurse at his heels. He was skinny and bespectacled, with gleaming black hair, and lots of it. Indian, obviously. Or Pakistani. Maybe Persian. Possibly Ethiopian. He looked surprisingly alert and energetic for someone who’d been up half the night.
    ”A good good morning to you,” he said breezily, scanning my case sheet that was hanging as per usual at the foot of the bed.
    ”Likewise, I’m sure,” I said. ”So what’s up, Doc?”
    ”Not us,” he said. ”For a good few days anyway.”
    ”What did I break?”
    ”We are not breaking anything at all, amazingly.” He grinned widely down at me. ”We are merely dislocating one of our lumbar vertebrae. Ouchy ouch! Screams of agony! Shoots of pain!”
    ”Tell me about it,” I said. ”So what did you do?”
    ”Wiggle, wiggle,” he said, demonstrating with his hands. ”Until it slipped back like a good little vertebra. Some weeny fraction of an inch is all we’re talking about. ‘Get back in there, you naughty boy!’ I was saying. Tell me this, young sir, did we ever have a shoulder dislocate?”
    ”Probably.”
    ”We are talking exactly the same principle here,” he said gleefully. ”We want to coax it back into its little socket where it belongs before the muscles stretch. Otherwise we might engender a permanent weakness which we do not desire, no no no, do we, Nurse?”
    ”No, Doctor,” Nurse said.
    ”Permanent weaknesses we have enough of already,” the patient said.
    ”We are expecting a certain amount of soreness,” the doctor said. ”Sadly, sadly, this is so. Mistreat any muscle in the body, and what results, Nurse?”
    ”Soreness, Doctor,” Nurse said.
    He beamed at her. ”We’ll ask my favorite osteopath in the whole wide world to drop by later and check you out, but we don’t think there is much he can do for you right now except give you a lovely rub all over and... what do you think, Nurse, some deep heat? Oh, yes, please!” He squirmed at the thought of it. Nurse looked away. The doctor then looked down at me archly.
    ”This is far, far from being the first time we are being in a hospital we could not help noticing last night,” he said, wagging one brown finger at me. ”When you were lying naked as a baby child before our very eyes. Goodness me, no.”
    ”You’re right,