Alien Romance, the daily comic strip

Karen gives her little speech. "We at Memorial Hospital have learned that many patients benefit from speaking with someone with real-life experience with injury and recovery."

She leaves them to speak in private. Ms. Upton, all bound up in a neck brace and stabilizer with a book in her lap, tries to figure out who Jon is. "I'm a volunteer," he explains. "If you want, I can tell you my story."

"Sure," she says.

"I was a senior at State. Three years ago I crashed my motorcycle and shattered my pelvis."

The crash scene isn't in the comic - the graphic novel starts six months after it occurred. But there is a scene where Jon is going through his prep packet for a round of reconstructive surgery, and it's complicated. I just didn't want him sitting there inventorying all of the bits and pieces, although he's done it before.

This whole scene was inspired by a thing I saw where the narrator was in the hospital with a catastrophic spinal cord injury and the chaplain came in to visit him. He wasn't religious, so he was an arse to the chaplain and told him not to come back again. Then later he regretted it, because the chaplain did indeed never come back again.