The nurse covered him with a heated blanket, and Matt basked 
in the warmth.  The cold he'd noticed earlier while still in 
his smashed car hadn't left him.  She asked him questions, 
and mostly Emily answered them for him, but Nurse Perky 
didn't seem to mind.  She just wrote everything down, poked 
and prodded him in half a dozen places, took his vital 
signs, and left him alone, for which he was grateful.

Emily pulled a chair up close beside him, and being careful 
of the IV tubing, took his unburdened right between both of 
hers.

"I'm sorry, Emily," he muttered, fighting the drowsiness 
caused by the medication.  "Stupid."

"What's stupid?"

"Me."

Emily shook her head, smoothing back the hair from his 
forehead and dropping a quick kiss there.  "We all do stupid 
stuff, Matt.  Sometimes I think we're just lucky if we don't 
kill someone else with our stupidity."

"You're not mad at me?"

"I'll be mad at you later.  Right now I'm just thankful 
you're still in one piece."

"Sort of, anyway.  He grinned weakly, then felt his eyes 
drooping again, and succumbed to the painkiller for a few 
moments.  Emily's voice stirred him back to the here and 
now.

"You going to sleep on me?"

"Just resting my eyelids a little."  

Matt wasn't sure how long he rested his eyelids, but when he 
lifted them again, his nurse had returned with a doctor, and 
the pain was beginning to work its way through the fog of 
medication that had been protecting him.

"Mr. Flannery, I'm Doctor Milburn.  Looks like you had a bit 
of an accident."

Matt didn't bother replying to that.  He saw Emily roll her 
eyes a little behind the doctor's back, and tried not to 
smile.

With an intensity of concentration akin to that Frank 
exhibited when he was about to take out an HT, the doctor 
looked him over from head to toe, paying special attention 
to his sore shoulder and both ankles.  Matt winced when he 
probed the right, but when the doctor touched his left 
ankle, he yelped.  

"Sorry about that." His examination completed, the doctor 
re-covered Matt with his warm blanket.  Chilled a bit from 
the exposure, Matt shivered.  Emily immediately tucked the 
blanket more closely around him, and he smiled his thanks.

"You've slightly dislocated your shoulder," Dr. Milburn 
continued, "and I'm going to put it back in place now.  You 
may feel some discomfort.  I'm going to have Karen hold you 
in place a bit, so don't panic."

The nurse, whose name was evidently Karen, positioned 
herself at Matt's head, and clamped tightly on his uninjured 
right shoulder.  With a movement almost too quick to see, 
Dr. Milburn slipped his shoulder joint back into place.  The 
agony was intense for a moment, and Matt gritted his teeth 
to keep from crying out.  Seconds later, the pain in his 
shoulder was all but gone. The only thing in its wake was a 
residual soreness, far milder than what he'd been feeling 
for the past hour.

"Hey, that's great," he said, amazed, and Dr. Milburn 
nodded.

"It always seems miraculous," he agreed.  "Unfortunately, I 
can't treat your other ailments quite as magically.  I'm 
going to send you for some X-rays in a few minutes, and 
we'll see what else we're dealing with.  How's your pain 
level at the moment?  Medication beginning to wear off a 
bit?"

"Yeah, a little.  Shoulder feels ok now, but I have a hell 
of a headache.  Ankles still hurt."

"Especially since I poked around on them, right?" Dr. 
Milburn grinned, and Matt decided maybe he liked this guy 
after all.  "Karen will put a little more Morphine in your 
IV in a few minutes.  That will help you get through the 
X-rays.  You're going to need a few stitches in your head, 
but we'll take care of that afterwards."

"Stitches?  C'mon, Doc, are you sure I need stitches?"

"Pretty sure, yes." There was only a hint of sarcasm in his 
tone, but at Emily's steady look, the doctor moderated his 
tone.  "Don't worry about the amount of blood, however.  
Head wounds normally bleed quite a bit, and that's nothing 
to worry about.  The good news is that you don't show any 
signs of concussion.  It looks like you just banged your 
head against the window and got a nasty cut."

While the doctor had been talking, Karen had slipped out of 
the cubicle and returned with another syringe of FeelGood.  
As his pain ebbed toward the fuzzy edges of his 
consciousness, Matt heard his speech begin to slur.

"I guess.  I don't really remember...all happened too fast."

"You have a pretty nasty gash on your head, Matt," Emily 
told him.  She gave his arm a pat of sympathy.  "Don't 
worry, I'll hold your hand."

They both disliked needles, but where Emily always viewed 
them as a necessary evil, Matt avoided them like the plague, 
and he knew he would need two, possibly three injections of 
local anesthetic to deaden the area to be stitched.  Having 
seen Emily receive similar treatment in the past, he knew 
the injections were far worse than the actual stitches.  

"Gee, thanks."

"Just rest for a few minutes, Mr. Flannery, until someone 
comes to take you to X-ray."  With that, Dr. Milburn ducked 
around the curtain and was gone.

They didn't have to wait long.  Less than ten minutes passed 
before an enormous man with a big smile and a gentle manner 
came to wheel him away.  Matt held out his hand toward Emily 
as he floated past her, and she gave it a good squeeze.

"I'll be right here," he heard her say.

He might have dozed on the way to X-ray, or it might have 
only been a ten second walk from the ER.  He wasn't sure, 
but before Matt was aware of any time passing at all, he had 
been turned over to a small woman wearing a scrub jacket 
with little penguins all over it.  That was appropriate, 
Matt thought, since the temperature in the room was roughly 
four degrees Fahrenheit.

"F-freezing!" he complained as she took his blanket away and 
positioned him for the first X-ray.

"Sorry," she replied briskly, not sounding sorry at all.  
"It's always a little chilly in here.  I'll be finished with 
you in a few minutes, and you can cover up again."

Matt endured the cold, and from far away was vaguely aware 
of some pain as she moved his feet and legs into different 
poses.  Finally, when she finished, she produced another of 
those wonderfully warm blankets to replace his old, 
cooled-off one.  She handed him back over to the orderly, 
whose name he learned was Geoffrey, and Matt felt the world 
whirling past as they left the room.

"Woah," he said, feeling a bit of motion-sickness.

"You okay?" 

"Just a little..."  Matt placed his hand over his stomach, 
as if that would somehow hold back the steadily growing 
nausea.  "I'm--I need--"  He tried to warn Geoffrey of 
impending danger as his gurney was returned to his cubicle, 
but the orderly was way ahead of him.

"Just try not to fight it," he advised, and Matt saw that he 
was already holding a plastic basin in front of his patient. 
"That just makes it worse." Geoffrey gently raised his head 
a little, and none too soon. 

Matt didn't have much left in his stomach from the night 
before, but everything that had managed to hang around this 
long made an appearance.  He felt as if the spasms went from 
his toes to his head.  Finally, with a look of relief, he 
collapsed back onto the pillow.

Karen reappeared with a cup of water, and he managed to take 
a sip or two through the straw and spit it back up.  His 
mouth felt as though a rhinocerous had crawled inside it to 
die.

"I'm going to put some more medicine in your IV to help with 
the nausea," Karen was saying as he rinsed and spit, and 
five minutes later approached him with another syringe.  
This time he didn't feel a rush as the medication entered 
his IV, but he was too spent to really care.  The pain in 
his left ankle was growing worse, as though the twisting and 
turning he'd endured in X-ray had aggravated it.  He no 
longer felt sick, but the weakness that always accompanied a 
bout of vomiting still hadn't left him.  All in all, he was 
just miserable.

"Do you have your weapon on you?" he whispered to Emily 
after Karen left.

"No, why?"

"I was hoping you could put me out of my misery."

Emily smiled and warmed his hand between hers again.  "Just 
try to go to sleep, Matt.  My theory has always been that 
you can't hurt while you're sleeping."

Matt closed his eyes and tried to obey.