Chapter 3 - THAT Can't Be Normal

Coincidence Speaks

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Happy Friday, and welcome to Chapter 3 of Coincidence Speaks! Thank you for being here.

If you are a new subscriber arriving via the essay Why Life Happens to Us, welcome! Coincidence Speaks - the Novel is an adventure story with similar themes on a grander scale. To start at the beginning, please head this way for Chapter 1.

A big THANK YOU to all readers and to the greater Substack community - my work has improved by leaps and bounds just being here. Special thanks to

Veronika Bond

Ben Sherreard

Christina G.

and

Troy Putney

for your early feedback and encouragement on this piece.

Chapter 3 finds Paul returning home from surgery, after a mysterious experience in the operating room…

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Chapter 3

THAT Can’t Be Normal

Paul Endrum’s leg was on fire.

It was like someone was holding a blowtorch to it—from the inside. He was not aware something this hellish was even allowed to exist.

The sharp pain of the ankle implosion in the Gold’s Gym had been breathtaking. But this was something transcendent in its viscerality. This level of pain burned away the very concept of measurement, the capacity to think.

He panicked as the anesthetic fully wore off and the burning didn’t stop intensifying. “Help me!” he implored Clara, fingernails clawing into the leather armrests of his fully reclined Man Chair, doing his best not to show her how terrified he was. He’d never been through any kind of surgery before, so he hadn’t known what to expect. Maybe this was just normal post-op pain.

Clara, a nurse practitioner with several impressive university degrees of her own and ten years of acute care experience under her belt, gave Paul multiple doses of painkillers and anti-inflammatories. When nothing touched the burning in Paul’s leg she began to get concerned.

“If this doesn’t get any better soon maybe we should think about going to the emergency room.”

Paul blanched. That was the absolute last thing he wanted. To be driven all the way to the hospital, to drag his wife and little girl there for hours of waiting and worry—only to be informed he was only overreacting to perfectly normal post-surgical pain. That what he was feeling wasn’t all that bad. That he was weak.

“I’m not going to let that happen. I can deal with this just like anything else,” he told himself. So he did the one thing left he still knew how to do. He faked it.

Faked through a forged smile and clenched teeth that it wasn’t all that bad. Pretended everything was still under some semblance of control. Because that was what “Real Men” were supposed to do, after all. “Real Men” were warriors—and pain was a part of life to be fought and forced through, to be overcome and banished.

So he crawled up the stairs to the guest room, quarantining himself far away from everyone who had ever loved him, and buckled in for a night of Real Man vs. Real Pain. 

It wasn’t much of a competition.

The invisible blowtorch inside his leg did not relent. As the late afternoon sun melted into the darkest night of his life, Paul writhed and moaned and smothered silent screams into a sweat-soaked pillow.

He forgot where he was, forgot who he was, exhausting all remaining ability to think coherent thoughts, hallucinating in fragmented images instead. Long having crossed the point of exhaustion, pure visceral panic kept him awake.

Thankfully human nervous systems can only handle so much before they short out. After untold hours he finally passed out into merciful oblivion.

When he awoke early the next afternoon, the pain had receded a bit from its previous unbearable levels. And he was grateful. But the burning sensation was still there, a newly permanent fixture pounding away in the background of everything.

Nothing was the same after that.

Paul began going through high dose narcotics like handfuls of candy from one of those Pez dispensers from his childhood. His best efforts to avoid overdoing them were swallowed up by a constant burning sensation that would not leave him alone. Clara was alarmed by the inordinate amount of pain her husband seemed to be experiencing.

At her insistence, Paul grudgingly called the orthopedic surgeon’s office. A pleasant pre-recorded voice told him to leave his name and number, and that they would get back to him as soon as possible. After two days and several more messages, the physician’s assistant finally called back.

“High levels of post-operative pain are perfectly normal,” she informed Paul with practiced reassurance. “Don’t worry, you’ll feel much better once the hard cast comes off.”

The dissonance between how he felt and what he was now hearing through the phone was unsettling. In the meantime, the physician’s assistant chirpily offered up another round of narcotics, which he gratefully accepted.

The hard cast was scheduled to come off two weeks post surgery. That was still ten days away. The cast felt tight and claustrophobic and he couldn’t wait to have it off. Paul resolved to make it through the next ten days and let his physician evaluate his progress in person.

Ten more sunsets and sunrises blurred together by festering fear and pharmaceuticals, until the day finally arrived for Paul to go in and get the cast removed.

Paul peered around the nurse’s practiced hands, neck craning for a better view as the last scraps of gauze peeled away onto the office floor. He blinked in confusion, and his breath caught in his throat.

What he saw hardly resembled a foot. It looked like a cartoon. “This is some kind of caricature my little daughter would draw,” he thought.

A fat, swollen lobster claw of an appendage.

It would almost be comical if it wasn’t his own leg he was looking at, and it didn’t hurt so bloody much. It was an angry shade of deep red—verging on purple—strangely shiny, and felt hot to the touch.

The concerned expression briefly flashing across the orthopedic surgeon’s face as he breezed into the room would have spoken volumes, had Paul been paying closer attention. His spoken words were very different though:

“Everything’s looking good here! That swelling and discoloration is pretty normal and should go down over time once you start regaining mobility.”

Paul breathed a deep sigh of relief hearing this reassurance from his doctor. Everything was OK and on track—he’d made the right call all along. Thank God he hadn’t added any more unnecessary drama to the situation than there already was. The pain and swelling he’d been experiencing was perfectly normal after all.

Along with the positive progress report from his physician, Paul was equally elated by the opportunity to resume taking one-legged showers again in the immediate future. Not to mention cleansing two weeks’ worth of sweat and grime from his aggrieved foot.

So the first thing he did when he got home was bing-bing his way on over to the bathtub for a long overdue washing. The new clunky boot he’d been given to replace the hard cast took forever to extricate, but at least it was removable. “This thing’s a straitjacket,” he muttered, struggling with at least eight different buckles and Velcro straps.

The water hadn’t quite warmed up when he gingerly placed his bare leg under the running faucet. Paul winced in surprise as alarm bells went off—the cold water from the bathtub faucet burned like liquid fire, and the mild water pressure itself was abject agony.

“What the…,” Paul sputtered as he turned off the faucet, perplexed.

Hopping carefully into the nearby shower instead, he was unnerved to find that even the warm water streaming from the showerhead far above stung so much he had to hold his leg out of the direct spray. And the bath towel he used to dry off afterward felt more like a burlap sack than a soft cloth.

Bewildered but finally clean, Paul bing-binged back to his Man Chair to rest and prop up his foot for the rest of the day.

But the bizarre hypersensitivity didn’t end there. When he hoisted himself into bed that evening, the high thread count bedsheets Clara had gotten them for Christmas the year before had somehow transmogrified into giant sheets of sandpaper rubbing his skin raw.

And there was no relief to be had on top of the bedsheets either—the gentle air breezing down from their ceiling fan, of all things, now felt like being stabbed by thousands of tiny knives.

“Now that’s ridiculous,” Paul said aloud to the ceiling fan, hoping his halfhearted levity might lessen the severity of the situation. It didn’t. The only thing that did, was another potent dose of narcotics and the four hour window of modest pain reduction that came with it.

The next morning Paul cracked an eye after a night of fitful sleep, alarmed to see the mottled dark red shade had begun to creep upwards from his foot and into his calf and knee. And the entire leg was now noticeably warmer than the rest of his body—in fact it had sweated profusely overnight. So much so that he had soaked through his bedsheets.

“Now that can’t be normal,” he whispered, no longer any trace of levity in his voice.

Then the electrocutions began. 

Arriving unannounced, random electrical zaps began to rock, shock, and jolt Paul’s leg, sometimes with enough force that it jerked uncontrollably, like it had been hooked up to a malfunctioning emergency defibrillator while he was sleeping. A truly medieval form of torture, made far worse by the unknown timeframe in which the next shock would occur, and the inability of painkillers to provide any relief. It soon became entirely impossible to sleep for any length of time.

Already at its breaking point, Paul’s overtaxed nervous system was unable to handle the cascade of symptoms compounded by insomnia. Robbed of the ability to rest, his hands and fingers began shaking, and constant heart palpitations stole his breath away. He couldn’t tell if he was dealing with some kind of strange neurological condition, or having a full on panic attack, or both. To cap everything off, a full-on migraine headache began pounding away at the insides of Paul’s skull.

He hid all of it from Clara as much as he could, withdrawing once more into a shell of himself in the upstairs guest room. After all, the doctor had just assured him he was progressing just fine.

But Paul didn’t know how much longer he could hold out. He was under assault by so much constant pain stimuli that his waking world had turned into something surreal.

“Am I hallucinating someone else’s life - someone else’s nightmare?” he wondered. 

Beneath it all was the strangest overarching feeling—it was hard to describe, but it was as if his afflicted leg had been quarantined from the rest of his body. It felt foreign. 

Like it didn’t belong to him anymore. 

Paul wasn’t the only one faking it. Ever since his ordeal had started, Clara had been putting on her best game face, struggling to convince herself that everything would be OK, all while juggling the household, a demanding career, and a precocious toddler all on her own.

As an empathic nurse practitioner who often brought her patients’ issues home with her, sometimes worrying about them through the night instead of sleeping herself, there was only so much more she could take on before her emotional state was spent.

There was little left in the tank for Paul, and he knew it.

He was desperate to shield the worst of his symptoms from Clara and deal with them on his own—she already took care of patients in acute pain all day, and the last thing he wanted was for her to come home to an incapacitated husband in hapless misery.

So even in the midst of being sequestered at home away from work, in constant pain assuaged only partly by narcotics, Paul hung onto his career tooth and nail. The sense of structure his job provided was one of the only things he had left to hang on to. He didn’t really know what he would do—or who he was—without any kind of providership role to give his life a sense of purpose, of meaning.

Paul choked down several pills the next morning, lying in bed propped on one side, doggedly working on pressing business from a laptop computer. At least he could somewhat distract himself by focusing on his work, especially when supplementing with copious opioids. Mental distraction was the one weapon he had left to fight these excruciating mystery symptoms, as his drug tolerance continued to grow and the effectiveness of the painkillers waned.

After immersing himself in work for several hours straight, the narcotics wore off and Paul came back up for air—and that’s when he noticed something truly, horribly mystifying.

“What the hell is going on?” This terrified him, far more than any of the bizarre symptoms that had been piling up over the past several days.

The exact same burning sensation that had first started in his right leg was somehow, some way, now also showing up in his left shoulder—on the opposite side of his body.

“How can the pain from my leg, be showing up five FEET away from the surgical site?! It’s… spreading!”

Paul Endrum had officially had it. He was completely, unequivocally done. At the very last frayed end of his rope, with no clue in the world as to what could be going on, and no earthly idea how to fix it.

Clara sprang into action, half carrying, half dragging Paul into the family car, dropping their little one off at her parents’ house, and driving them to the emergency room at the local hospital where she worked. 

“We need some pain control, and some second opinions,” she said to Paul in her best professional voice as she navigated her familiar work commute. 

Paul couldn’t believe how calm and collected she sounded while he worked overtime next to her just trying not hyperventilate. Failing miserably, he was unable to catch his shallow panicked breath. Paul felt nauseous with fear over the mysteriously spreading symptoms, and equally sickened to be putting his own wife through this never-ending ordeal.

Upon arrival at the hospital, Paul and Clara were taken back to a semi-private corner area of the emergency room and visited by a revolving door of well-meaning, fascinated, and perplexed doctors and specialists. Many were Clara’s peers, and it truly felt like they went above and beyond for him. But after ruling out any life-threatening pathologies, they could find nothing else wrong besides the obvious swelling and the strange temperature difference. 

One of the neurologists, a jovial older man with a white beard and kind eyes, prescribed a new anti-convulsant for the electric shocks and merrily ordered up yet another fresh round of heavy duty narcotics. He instantly reminded Paul of Santa Claus. But instead of toys for good girls and boys piled high in his sleigh, this good-natured neurologist gave out the latest FDA-approved drugs. 

With a strange enthusiasm eerily reminiscent of the orthopedic surgeon recommending microfracture surgery for the first time, he assured Paul, “There are lots of different drug combinations we can try. We’ll find something that works for you.”

Something snapped in Paul and he felt his heart sinking.

It was then it dawned on his dazed, trauma-stricken mind that the proposed “solution” by this cheerful neurologist and his well-meaning peers was not ever going to fix his problem. At best, the proposed remedy would only ever be a merry-go-round shot in the dark attempt to mask and manage the terrible, inexplicable symptoms.

He swallowed heavily at the full realization. “Even with the best of intentions, they have no idea what’s wrong with me. Whether they mean to or not, I’ve already been written off as one more patient with inexplicable, intractable pain. I’m already a statistic.”

Then he asked himself a question, one that turned out to be one of the most important questions he’d ever asked:

“How the hell did I end up here?”

End Chapter 3

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Next Chapter➡️

Chapter 4 will post next Friday, February 16th. Thank you for being here in live interactive real time! Comments and feedback are always welcome.

In gratitude,

E.T. Allen