Life as I Know It Read Online Free PDF

realization gave me fresh cause to breathe a sigh of relief. A less experienced doctor must mean that my injuries were minor and little cause for concern.
    My mind went back to the dream and Lauren’s injuries. She had been far more badly injured than I had been. Of course she wasn’t real, just a figment of my imagination, but I wondered why, if I’d invented her, I had also envisaged her as having been struck more severely by the lightning—badly enough, it seemed, for her heart to have stopped beating altogether.
    With half my mind still preoccupied by Lauren and the dream, I watched as the consultant, a bald-headed man with a smart pinstripe suit visible inside the flapping white lab coat, looked down his beaklike nose at me as if appraising a joint ofmeat for his Sunday roast. I tried to dismiss the picture of the buzzard that leapt into my mind as I pulled the bedclothes protectively around my chest.
    The buzzard spoke in a rather bored voice that belied the interest in his eyes. “So, what have we here?”
    Dr. Chin sprang into action, gripping his notes and reading jerkily, “This is Ms. Taylor. Twenty-eight years of age. She was admitted yesterday with minor burns to the left back and shoulder after being hit by lightning.”
    “Ah, the lightning girl, eh? Saved by her coat. Jolly lucky escape, Ms. Taylor, if I may say so.” The consultant smirked and turned his attention back to the anxious intern. “Any related problems?”
    “Ms. Taylor was unconscious on arrival. Two-hourly obs showed everything reading normal. On regaining consciousness, she seemed disoriented, but has since recovered all her faculties.”
    “So, ready to go home then, Ms. Taylor?”
    I nodded.
    “Good, good. I think we can discharge her today.”
    Losing interest quickly, he moved to a bed on the opposite side of the room. I watched as he stared distastefully down at the next unfortunate patient. “And what have we here?” he intoned unemotionally from the other side of the room.
    A commotion at the entrance to the ward diverted my attention from the huddle of doctors. The male nurse who had been so kind to me earlier was talking earnestly with a visitor, whose face was barely visible behind a large bunch of flowers.
    “You’ll have to wait until the ward round is finished,” the nurse was saying in hushed tones. “You can wait in the visitors’ room. Who is it you’ve come to see?”
    The man lowered the flowers a fraction, and my whole bodytensed with a mixture of excitement and apprehension as I recognized the stranger from the previous day. My first instinct was to slide down under the covers and pull the sheet over my head, but my body seemed to be stuck rigidly in position. He glanced into the room, his eyes searching, coming to rest on my face.
    He looked different than how I’d remembered him, his short hair framing a square, masculine face. Behind the flowers he was wearing beige cargo pants with an open-necked polo shirt hanging loose at a slim boyish waist. Thank goodness I wasn’t connected to a heart monitor like in the dream, I thought, as I felt the blood pounding through my veins. It would have beeped off the scale!
    He waved at me over the flowers, then followed the nurse out into the corridor, presumably to wait until the buzzard had finished his round. As soon as he was out of sight, I bolted upright and ran my fingers through my hair, trying to tease out some of the tangles. Quickly, I rummaged through the bedside cabinet, but this time there was no handy brush, mine or otherwise. I couldn’t believe it. Here I was without so much as a hairbrush or lipstick, when the most handsome man I had set eyes on for years was visiting.
    By the time the consultant and his followers had left the ward, I was utterly apprehensive. What was I supposed to say to this man whose name I didn’t even know? We’d met so briefly, so intensely in the violence of the storm. What must he think of me, a muddy,