Is this the real life?

She lay in bed, running through her to-do list for the day, keeping her eyes closed for a few more minutes after her alarm started to go off. When it began beeping for the second time, she finally admitted defeat and opened her eyes; she went to reach for her alarm to switch it off but found that her arm was too heavy to move.

She blinked a few times, looking up at the ceiling. The lights were far brighter than they should have been, she must have forgotten to close the curtains last night when she went to bed. She tried to turn her head to her bedside table to look at the alarm but couldn’t make her head move, she tried to move her arm again, but her body wouldn’t listen to her. She squeezed her eyes shut, hoping that she was still asleep, but upon opening them again, nothing had changed, the lights were too bright, and she couldn’t move her arms. She listened harder and realised the beeping wasn’t the same as the alarm clock she set every morning. She tried to reach out for her husband, who usually got up a few minutes after her, and spent the time she was getting ready in the bathroom reading the news. Her arms wouldn’t move, and she couldn’t hear him breathing. She felt like she was alone in the bed.

She heard footsteps in her room, she tried to look to see who it was, but her head wouldn’t move, she kept her eyes open hoping that whoever it was would walk so she could see them.

“Can you grab another bag of fluids? The antibiotics have run through.”

She started at the male voice, as it was so familiar, it was her husband. But he was speaking words that he would never say in real life, as he worked in IT. Why would he be talking about antibiotics?

“No problem Simon, I’ll go get them. If you could just stop that damn pump alarm as it’s driving me up the wall.”

She tried to look over to her right at the other voice that belonged to her mum, why was her mum in the house at 6.30am? What the hell was going on?

She waited in silence for a few minutes. All she could do was blink and look straight at the ceiling, she tried to look left and right, but her eyes wouldn’t move, she tried to make her limbs work, but they wouldn’t move either.

Suddenly fingers were pulling her eyelids open, and a torch shone in her eyes.

“Any change?”

She was shouting inside her head, why was her husband acting like this? Why couldn’t she move?

“No, pupils react to light, but no response otherwise.”

She felt her arm being picked up off the bed and dropped. She screamed inside her head, yelling for her mum to stop moving her arms around and to see that she was there.

“Still no muscle tone.”

“Shame, I don’t know why her parents waste their money keeping her here.”

She wanted to yell at him. What was her husband talking about?

“She was so young when the accident happened, they obviously didn’t want to let her go.”

Why was her mother talking about her parent? She didn’t understand, as she was her mum.

“Well, it’s been seven years now, I think they probably should admit defeat, their daughters not waking up”.

She wanted to yell at him, what the hell was he talking about? She hadn’t been in an accident, she’d been married to that man for the last two years, and they’d been together for four years.

“It’s hard, as she was only twenty-five when it happened, they obviously can’t let her go.”

Her brain froze, she couldn’t have had an accident at twenty-five, she remembered celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday, she remembered meeting her husband when she had just turned twenty-eight, she remembered marrying him at thirty, and she remembered celebrating her thirty-second birthday four weeks ago.

“That’s up to them, but if it was my child or wife, I wouldn’t want her to live like this. I don’t think a permanent vegetative state is living.”

She started crying in her head, no no no no no no. She could feel tears dripping down her cheeks. But still, no one knew she was there. She shut her eyes to block out the light and listened to their voices as they walked away from her bed, already talking about the next job they had to do, no longer focused on her.

She didn’t want to live like that, trapped inside a body. She lay there hoping for it to all go away, hoping that this was just a nightmare. She felt the light change through her eyelids and opened them. She was sitting at her desk in front of her computer, her mobile was by her right hand. She grabbed it and texted her husband, then she put the phone down, taking deep breaths until she heard the reassuring beep of a text, grabbing her phone, she saw her husband had replied straight away, saying he loved her too.

She tried to remember how she got to work that day, but all she could recall was waking up in the hospital and then opening her eyes and being here. She realised if she listened hard, she could still hear the beep of the heart monitor and the sound of the nurses walking around. So she chose not to listen, she knew this wasn’t real, she knew she’d just seen a glimpse of her real-world, and if she thought really hard, she could remember all the times she’d opened her eyes in that room in the past. But she decided that this dream was better than her reality, and when her colleague walked up to the desk to ask her something, she texted her husband back quickly, saying she loved him too; then turned and smiled at the woman she had worked with every day for the last three years.

“Hi Sue. How can I help you?”