Alien Romance, the daily comic strip

[gs_silva]

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.

Comments

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> 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. <<

Some people say "go away" and mean it; I am one of them. Some people say "go away" because they want to see if the other person cares enough to pester them. These two groups of people make life harder for everyone because getting the right answer requires identifying whether someone is telling the truth or lying. Me, I never have any patience with that kind of lying; it drives me nuts.

"Determine Where You Start" is my take on handling a newly acquired disability. Very similar context, very different solution.

Re: Thoughts

[gs_silva]

That is really long. And it covered much more than I could ever cover in dialogue. Meticulously informative! A big difference in our storytelling styles - you explain everything in detail, and I gloss over things and let the reader fill in the blanks if they choose. In fact, a lot of my commentary is specifically for you. Doing your infodump in poem form was nice! I got to enjoy your art, the very best way to get infodumped.

Man oh man, these high-level athletes, huh? And your poor guy got it on the field! Ouch!

Somebody once commented on an early scene of mine, "Soccer, huh? Well, I guess you can get paralyzed in soccer..." You can get paralyzed in baseball too, actually, but fortunately for Jon, his beloved sport didn't nearly kill him. No, it was his other hobby that tried to kill him, and he's not even very mad about that.

A little mad. Not very.

Then again, if Jon had Quain's predicament, he'd be a lot angrier. The scene where he got the wheelchair upgrade was a turning point. He has a lot of fun in that, and he'll happily admit it if you ask.

The scale of the injury has a little something to do with the scale of the risk-taking, at least in these cases. Big deal sports guys taking big risks. Maurice lives a lower-risk lifestyle and he only gets a broken arm (which doesn't get handwaved away, alas, he's in the wrong book for that). Then again, Maurice grew up in a place where "shredded by a combine harvester" or "buried in a silo" were the risks to avoid, so he'll be all right.

Next we'll find out which kind of person Ms. Upton is! Jon is definitely a "say no and then regret it" type, but he'll never tell you he made a mistake.

I think I'm a "hear them out and then grumble about it" type. I have a terrible habit of tuning out what people are saying to me, and waiting until the end to say, "Sorry, pain makes it hard to concentrate, but I'll take it from here! Thanks, bye!" Anyway, 80% of people's advice requires money I don't have, so...