CHAPTER FIVE #3
His long, lean muscles sprang to action.
Run! was the only thought that flew into my mind before I tripped over rocks, slipped into the pool of water, and clambered up the bank on the other side.
I tripped again, banging my shin on a branch, which sent jabbing needles through the nerves of my leg, and I shouted out my discomfort so the jungle might know the full force of my pain.
I didn’t wait to see if he followed but picked myself up and half-hobbled in an awkward run while leaves and branches slashed at my face in a blur.
I ran another few minutes and crouched behind a large palm, my heart hammering. My back pressed against the thick trunk of hardened fronds, as I listened for any sounds of pursuit. My poor right shin oozed blood and throbbed like it had a heartbeat of it’s own.
What the actual hell, Sidney? My mind groped for logic, trying to find a footing on what I had experienced over the last half hour. How would I get out of this?
I needed to get back to the road—the only orienting landmark I knew—and find the field hospital. I checked the time—3:32 p.m. and waited another five minutes with no sound of pursuit before emerging. Back toward the pool I limped, being cautious to stop and listen ever so often.
I walked ten minutes, sweating through my clothes, half from terror, half from the heat, before I realized—I wasn’t back to the pool.
I pushed down the sinking feeling that I’d gotten lost in the New Guinean jungle with a possible cracked shin bone and a concussion.
“Dammit,”—it came out in a sob. I wiped angry tears away while my aching head made it difficult to think. The truth was that I’d hit my head again before the first gash I’d gained on my first day had completely healed.
I wasn’t usually this klutzy, and thinking back on the eventful journey that had gotten me to this moment, I began to wonder if I had made a grave mistake coming on this trip at all.
Nothing was going the way it was supposed to—a theme of my life.
I reached up to inspect the new bandage I’d haphazardly created, and then felt for the small line of stitches I’d gotten from Greg, above my eyebrow.
The walkie! Why hadn’t I grabbed it from the Rover?
Idiot. I had to figure this out. I would figure this out!
I just had to get my bearings. I turned thirty degrees to my left and began walking again, sure the clearing was just on the other side of these trees.
My thoughts wandered in and out of reality, memory, delirium.
“You’ll like this,” Greg’s voice came to me as an echo.
I saw him in my mind’s eye, sitting near the crackling fire at Coffee Trends on a cold night in December.
He was reading, and always stopped to share a bit he thought might interest me.
I humored him, sometimes barely paying attention, mildly irritated at the interruption of my charting.
“‘Most people want to feel like they are in control, but what they fail to realize is that they actually are.’” That piqued my interest. I looked up from my laptop as he continued.
“‘You’ve heard the old adage, ‘perception is reality…’”he continued to read, “‘suppose something happens to you that is the worst thing you could possibly imagine. If you allow this perception to control your perspective, it will become your reality and greatly diminish the outlook of your future.’”
Greg shared more about mining for the valuable lessons in the things that happen to us, the final upshot concluded—the ability to control a situation lies, not in controlling the outcome, but in controlling one’s reaction or perspective to the things that happen, and to be ready in case the situation ever presents itself again.
It’s what I did with cases that went sideways. Patients I’d lost. Mistakes that kept me up at night. I dissected the situation, organizing thoughts, actions, outcomes, and running the sequence of events for each new possible action I might take.
It’s the only way I’d survived after Jonathan died—by staying in control, focusing all my attention on work, saving as many lives as possible. It kept the guilt at bay.
So, yes, you are in control…in a sense. Control of yourself.
It’s what kept me from wallowing in cynicism and hopelessness at the world I encountered on a regular basis.
Well, at least it seemed to keep hopelessness at bay.
Cynicism seemed to follow me no matter how hard I tried to leave it behind.
I’d finally stopped struggling and learned to let it trail behind me like an unwanted piece of luggage on wheels.
Well, I rather doubted the situation of being lost in the jungle with no way of contacting anyone, running from a crazy, zombie-looking creature would ever present itself again.
But I humored myself as I continued to walk, remorse setting in, making a mental list of what I would do differently next time.
Staying put at the village, not traveling to New Guinea in the first place, made the top of the list.
But what if Greg and the others really were in trouble? I was doing no good to them lost out here—I had to find the falls and the road and get back.
I pushed the wild ferns aside to reveal a circular outcropping of rock, which surprised me less than the small gathering of clay-colored natives that I had stumbled upon.
Panic seized me and I readied myself to run, but hands grabbed hold of me and something hard hit my head…
again, I thought ironically, before green dissolved to black.