Chapter 10 - Miracle

She wakes, her heart pounding out of her chest. Perspiration drips down her forehead. She rubs her back and neck, realizing her awkward sleeping position. It had been an hour since Nick had admitted himself to the hospital, and the doctor had not come out to discuss the diagnosis. He's dead already, she worries, and it's all my fault.

All she recovered from the accident, physiologically, was a mild concussion. Psychologically, a much different story: the memory of watching his closed eyes, the memory of the EMTs reviving him in the ambulance. The horrific memory of nearly ten minutes of an absence of any heartbeat within him. She had watched the medical specialists rush him into the emergency room, shouting about him having something called v-fib.

She put her head in her hands, her ears dropping over the front. She remains for a moment, the terror crippling her. She is unable to handle it and did not want to figure out or know what was wrong with him. She just wishes that there would be nothing wrong. And that is entirely possible, she reassures herself, head still in her hands.

"Ms. Hopps?" A deep, concerned voice interrupts her thoughts.

She glances up to a male fox wearing a pair of black pants, a white lab coat and a white gown underneath. "We've got the results."

Judy shoots up from her chair, her eyes bloodshot from bouts of crying. "How is he?"

The doctor takes a breath. "Ma'am, your friend, after being knocked out by the airbag received a dramatic blow to the head, just like you did. But unfortunately, his condition is much more serious... ma'am, he has a cerebral hemorrhage."

She is unable to know what it meant, can feel how terrible it is. She knows that it could kill him. But the lack of medical training prohibits this action. What does that mean?

As if the doctor communicates telepathically, he quickly explains the meaning. "The blow caused a rupture of a blood vessel in the most vital portion of the brain."

She remains silent for a moment to ponder the severity of his condition. After a moment, she asks the only question she knows possible: "Is there any treatment?" she says, tears flowing into her eyes.

The doctor sighs, shaking his head. "I am very sorry, but, no safe options are available, besides hoping it clears up. Surgery is available to attempt to correct it, but in this case, the chances of him having permanent brain damage are inevitable. It would take a miracle to save him."

She nods. "Can I go see him?"

She slowly opens the door, looking into the room. A respirator covers his snout and a neck support hugs his neck. He appears more like a robot than a living mammal. Next to him was a screen showing all the vitals, and a bandage covers his leg to suffice as a healing mechanism for bruising. His eyes have closed, and his chest extends and lowers constantly. She again glances up at his head. I can't believe there's that much bleeding in there. He looks normal.

He looks horrible, and in so much pain. She touches under his eyelid, and the fur is damp. He's crying too, she realizes, and I know he's crying because he doesn't want to die. I feel the same way.

Suffering is too much. I just want to help him. He's so helpless. We're both suffering. I wish I could help him. I just want to do something that helps him so we can walk home. He can't die now.

She walks up to him, squeezing his hand in hers, sobbing deeply. He barely lifts his eyelids and smiles weakly at her. "Judy..." he says unintelligibly.

She smiles and squeezes his hand harder. She closes her eyes for a minute, tears running down her cheeks. "What are you doing..." he whispers, holding up his hand slightly.

She smiles. "Praying."

He smiles, a warm feeling starting to emerge in his chest. He wasn't too religious himself, but he knew she was willing to do anything to save him. She's helping me. I may not believe it, but if it helps me, that'll be great.

The doctor again enters the room. "Judy, I need you," he says, ushering the small rabbit into the hall.

Judy considers the doctor's eyes, frowning, tears still in the corners of her eyes. "What, sir?"

"We took a deeper consideration into those brain scans. I don't like to say this very often," his eyes gloss over. "Your friend's hemorrhage has grown nearly twice its size, and it looks like he has lost nearly a fourth or a fifth of his blood volume. In his current condition, he most likely will not survive the night."

The words Judy dreaded struck her heart. He's dying. Her lungs can barely suffice to keep her conscious, but she remains so. The tears streaming her face feel thick, like a river flowing down her cheeks.

She realizes he still speaks, but she manages to receive the most vital information. "And it would be much better if we didn't tell him that," the doctor says. "So, it would be wise to spend as much time as you possibly could with him. If you were to tell him of his condition, there would be a very high chance that the bleeding would increase - due to increased heart rate - and would kill him very quickly. This may not be the case, but we don't want to take any chances."

Judy nods slowly, her eyes still drenched with tears, but dry. She had cried all she could, and the same empty feeling remains, but the tears run dry. She walks up to his still body, smiling at him. She doesn't want to see him this way. A deep feeling of dread, anger, and depression sets in. She starts sobbing again, but much harder.

"What's wrong?" he manages, wearily clenching his teeth. "Judy, please tell me."

After a moment, he mutters the phrase: "Judy, am I gonna die?"

She sits down on the chair. Should I tell him?

Despite the doctor's advice, she nods wearily. The beeping on the monitor increases, but does not proceed to a constant sound. Finally, it decreases after a minute and returns to normal. The day went on, and she stays in the room as much as possible, only leaving for short bathroom breaks. She is unable to eat or drink. She desperately desires to follow the doctor's advice.

The hours continue until midnight, and she remains at his conscious body. "I love you, Nick," she whispers, kissing him lightly on the forehead. "Even if... you don't live to see me again, I will never forget you," she confesses, tears rushing to her eyes again, and she desperately wipes them on his hospital gown. "Oh, Nick! Why did I have to do this? It's all my fault!" she yells, collapsing onto his chest, again breaking down in misery. The hours pass quickly as if time wants him to die.

2:03. The time on Nick's bedside broadcasts the number. The number signifying earliness, prematurity, a new beginning, or a horrid lack of sleep. Judy lifts her head to the number. A strange sound suddenly enters the air that she had not heard in the countless hours in that hospital. An incessant sound, one that refuses to stop. However, the chest Judy lay on now refuses to continue. "No," she says, looking up at the monitor. "No, it can't," she soon begins to panic and scans the room for someone.

"Code blue, ICU. I repeat, Code blue, ICU," the announcement chants, filling Judy with a chilling realization.

Nick's heart had stopped.

Judy can't follow any protocol for anything she had taken years of training to master. Nothing comes to her mind. What do I do?

Footsteps. A doctor appears, and so does another. Two more. Then, two nurses. Six people rush around the unconscious patient, treating him like a medical experiment than an actual person. One doctor presses against Nick's chest like dropping a bag full of bricks on a trampoline. He does this repeatedly.

And yet, in cardiac arrest for another time in his life. And to the hospital yet again, after a bout of coronary artery disease and kidney stones. More hospital bills, adding to the already mountainous pile of debt they currently are in. But she is willing to double it to let him come back. Let all this disease disappear by some miracle.

Her fox, who had gone to the hospital three times, experienced a death of his grandmother, his brother leaving suddenly, embarrassment, mourning over her own trip to the hospital, and his heroic success of saving her from his own father. Now, because of her own mistake, he is dying. And by hearing the frustrated remarks of the doctors and their use of paper towels to dab their foreheads, she knows it is time.

No revival, no pulse, no breathing, no life. Judy can't believe it happens. She doesn't want to get in their way. She closes her eyes again, tears flowing. She stands in the same position until a phrase snags her ear.

"Alright, call it."

Judy looks up, three exhausted nurses, doctors, and an unconscious Nick. She knows resuscitation can happen. She just can't admit it. But she has hope. "Please don't call it yet. Try for five more minutes."

The nurses urgently follow her suggestion and do as she says. Five minutes later, the same outcome resulted. With no hope, the doctor lifts his hands from the lifeless body. "Nicholas Wilde, 2:45 PM," he still is unconscious, and the nurse checks for a pulse, nothing. She tries again, but nothing. "We've tried all we could, but I guess it's his time," she confesses, wiping her forehead. "I'm sorry, Judy."

Judy nods at the statement, unwilling to accept anything. The nurse pulls out a large white form, placing the number 2 in the hour's column onto the paper.

Beep.

But now it features the same number on the vitals meter. The nurse gasps, awed. "We've got a weak pulse."

Judy smiles weakly at herself as the team wheels Nick away into the most intensive portion of the intensive care unit.

Now as Judy enters this portion of the intensive care unit, he looks even worse than before. A respirator on him, monitors on his bare chest and monitors on his fingers, all connecting in a jumble of wires connected to various machinery.

Now he looks more like a science experiment. She can't and doesn't want to recognize him. That's not him. It can't be.

But he is right there, in the intensive care unit, at three in the morning, with a severe brain aneurysm, and a brain full of history. She can't lose this precious fox - with countless hours of selfless service, sickness, and experience. A life too valuable to lose.

For the fourth time that morning, she closes her eyes and continues to pray for him. She wants him to live. She wants to see him grow and prosper with her.

She wants to try to date him, become his fiancée, and have an opportunity of marriage. She wants to have a few kids and watch their kids grow. A few kids, yes, that's it. Her grandchildren would get to ponder Nick's medical mystery.

"If he lives," the doctor had told her prior to isolating her with Nick, "he sustained so much brain damage during the impact and lack of oxygen there is a very small chance he will be able to recognize you, and he will be very impaired. If he dies tonight, it means his brain cannot take it anymore."

It is too early for him to die now. Sixty years too early. With much more experience to be ahead of him, it is too early. She walks up to him, again, and bends her head into his open forearm and sobs into it, softly whispering incessant words to him.

Wanting him to live.

Sure, his body is full of experience and disease, but he can live. Many people have lived through these experiences, but he can live. I know it.

But she can't change the past. She knows that it would soon be time for him, but she can't admit it.

The nurse walks in carefully, monitoring his stats. "Normal heart rate and normal oxygen rate?" She wrinkles her nose in confusion. "Doctor?" The nurse says. Judy looks up at the call.

The doctor, already outside the doorway, walks in. "Yes, nurse? What is the issue?"

"You need to see these stats. They're not normal for his condition."

The doctor smiles as he looks at the stats, walking up to Nick. He slowly pulls the mask from Nick's snout.

"What are you doing?" The nurse says.

"His stats are completely normal," he pauses, gesturing out the doorway. "Get another MRI. I need to see his condition," the nurse does so, and he walks up to Judy. The nurse quickly removes Nick's unusually healthy body and rushes him away.

"Let's go downstairs," the doctor says to Judy, "and I'll bring you the results of the brain scan."

Minutes later, sitting in the waiting room, waiting makes her so anxious she is ready to burst into the room. But she does not. It isn't worth it. Especially with a doctor with hundreds of hours of experience by her, she knows the results will be bad. Nick had already developed severe hemorrhaging, an almost inoperable asymptomatic condition. He's lying in the MRI room with a bleeding brain, and the doctors think he is okay all because of normal vitals.

She sits longer, patiently waiting. Something tempts her to call the Chief to tell him the news. But something makes her put her phone down. It feels like Nick's voice inside her head. "Put the phone down. Everything's gonna be okay."

It is so realistic, she looks around frantically but finds nobody.

She sits in disappointment for the next twenty minutes until the doctor walks into the waiting room. "Ms. Hopps? I think you need to come see this."

The feeling of anxiety and nervousness almost makes her expel her stomach contents. No. He's gonna die.

She walks into the radiology department, the doctor's face in surprise.

She looks at him oddly. "What's with the awe? I've been mourning outside for his future death! What can be so amazing about a brain when it's bleeding?

The doctor smiles. "I'm awed at something else. I'll show you," he brings up a photo on the computer, which resembles the eagle's eye view of the internal structure of a brain, cradling inside a fox-shaped skull. The brain appears without blemishes, and only with perfect ripples running through it. No scars, nothing, of what her experience permits. The doctor's experience can show something different.

She examines it for a moment. "What's wrong with it?"

Oh, no. He's gonna tell me what's wrong with him.

The doctor grins at her comment. "I'm saying the exact same thing."

What? Was I right for a change? Judy looks at him again, puzzled. "What?"

The doctor laughs. "Ms. Hopps, I stared at your friend's brain scan for twenty minutes, looking for an aneurysm. I checked the name four times to see if it was right. His brain is completely normal. I even checked with our most experienced radiologists and two of our neurologists for a thought. They found nothing wrong."

Judy's stomach lifts, and her jaw falls inches from detaching from her skull. Her eyes widen in surprise and happiness. "Normal? I thought he had that hemorid thingy," she says, the inside of her no longer feeling like a brick, but two ounces of chocolate.

The doctor laughs. "Hemorrhage. And yes, he did. He also had a ruptured artery in the brain. There's no bleeding, no hemorrhage, and no aneurysm. Like I said, it's completely normal."

Judy shakes her head, so confused and shocked that she put her paws on her temples. "It doesn't make sense. Blood doesn't just clear up like that."

The doctor nods. "I'm as confused as you are. And I've had twelve years more medical schooling."

Miraculously, under mysterious circumstances, Nick's aneurysm cleared itself and leaves no residue or evidence to back it up. The neurologists in the hospital deem it as "mysterious hemorrhagic brain cleansing." It shocks many around the city and the globe, thanks to the help of the local newspaper and collaboration of local news networks. It is only a matter of time - two days upon his release - until Nick ends up at his own house with Judy at his side, and he spots something in the local newspaper, finding that he was only one of seven documented cases - on the planet - to heal miraculously.

Five days following the miraculous event, Judy replays the entire scenario over and over in her head. The rock had started it all, and the miracle had ended it. The rock gave him the hemorrhage. And his body miraculously cleared it out.

The source of the accident lionizes Nick, providing him recognition by many for the next few months, soon after the Zootopian Times and ZNN collaborate and conduct a personal interview, which airs live on Zootopia News Network. One author even states that he will write a book about him, and over the next two months, and through weekly collaboration, the author eventually begins the biography on him.

Over a period of two weeks, as all the celebrities come and go, his fame slowly fades. Fewer reporters come to their house weekly and interview them. Eventually, the collaboration drops altogether and eventually dissipates.

Nine months following his release, he finds himself and Judy standing in a park at nine-o-clock a Saturday night. While the buildings surrounding the quiet park ring with energy, the park remains quiet. They both face the beautiful full moon, and the crickets fill the air with beautiful song. Nick bends down on one knee and gives her a small, forethought speech, then pulls out a ring and proposes to her. The night ends in a round of grateful embraces and shedding of tears.

Finally, standing above a sizable crowd in the very park in which the explosion occurred quite a long time earlier, Nick and Judy witness the words in which they had both wished to witness Jack's marriage day.

"You may kiss the bride."

The crowd sheds many tears, exchanges many embraces, and provide many congratulations to the happy, recent couple.

Seven months later, after many arguments and agreements, the happy bunny conceives her first pup, Jace. She bears him 35 days later. She conceives two female pups within the year, names being Laverne and Jessica. The happy, 5-member family makes many memories, all three of their kids going to preschool, elementary, middle, and high school. They graduate with almost-perfect grades and all manage to apply and join the identical college. Jace eventually manages a career as a firefighter, Laverne as a stay-at-home mom, and Jessica as a police officer in the Zootopia Police Department. After graduating from the Academy, Jessica pairs as a trio with her father and mother for five years before both Nick and Judy retire.

Twenty-five years following Nick's accident, all three of their children bear their own children, and Nick and Judy gratefully and happily become grandparents. Life continues, and twenty years later, or forty-five years after Nick's accident, after all three of Nick's grandkids apply into college, Judy receives unfortunate news: the local doctors diagnose her with terminal brain cancer at the age of 72 and soon she admits to the hospital. Nick, eighty years old and twenty years retired, stays by her side. He now imagines the horror that Judy had felt forty-five years earlier before his remarkable recovery. Now sitting in the intensive care unit, he holds his wife's hand, cradling it so dearly as Judy had done since that day, muttering the words "I love you" to her as she had done. He only occasionally leaves to visit his children and grandchildren and to pay the bills with government leave and a small job at the local supermarket.

Now, forty-seven years after the accident, at the age of eighty-two, he stands by a grave. This gravestone is special, being that he put nearly two thousand dollars into its creation. Completely marble, this gravestone signifies the love that Nick had and still has. The grave of his true hero, the one that saved his life that one day forty-seven years prior. The one that stood with him, even in the hardest of times. Judy Laverne Hopps, his only hero and wife, died a day before she turned 73. Her brain simply could not handle the constant growth of malignant cells. He falls to his knees, puts his paws on the gravestone, and stares into the words engraved within. "Carrots – I've always loved you. You know that. Ever since I made you confess that you loved me so long ago, I've loved you."

Quickly, a memory rushes to his head. He stands up, looking at the gravestone. He looks at his clothing, the same tan khakis, the same green shirt, and the same blue tie tucked into the collar.

The dream.

So long ago, the dream he had that he kept all his life. The one when he stood at the grave site.

Nick looks down at the gravestone and catches himself stuffing his paws in his pockets. He remembers waking from his dream just before having read the name on the gravestone next to his grandmother's. Nick looks to his left - June Wilde, the gravestone he had seen in his dream very clearly. On his left is his wife's gravestone.

Realization kicks in. That was Judy, he ponders, looking at the gravestone again. Somehow my dream foretold Judy's death.

Nick stares down at the words below the engraved name of his wife he had read so many times already.

'Turns out, real life's a little bit more complicated than a slogan on a bumper sticker. Real life is messy. We all have limitations. We all make mistakes.'

Two years and some-odd months later, Nick spends the last moments of his life, with a crippling headache, looking at all the wonderful pictures of him and his grandchildren, with his children, and with his wife in his early life. He stares down at a specific photo in the so very cherished book of memories. "Judy," he says, tracing his finger on the photo. As he sets down his last picture, he stands up for a moment, and the sudden rise in blood pressure sets off a chain reaction in his own body. He passes out, fifty years after the accident. His daughter Jessica discovers Nick two hours after he passes, and the forensic pathologist rules his case as a stroke.

Twenty years later, Shaun, Jessica's grandson, opens a dusty box in the garage and blows on it, coughing furiously over the intense amount of dust entering his lungs. He slowly pries open the black leather case and looks inside. "Great-grandpa?" he says, looking at it again. The face in the full-color photo appears grey and old, and very wise. Tears come to Shaun's eyes as he hugs the leather case. "Oh, Great-grandpa... I'd knew I'd find someone to help me. Mom's told me so much about you... I wish I could be you right now. I wish you could come down and give me a big hug," he digs down in the box and finds an old, crumpled newspaper at the bottom of the box. As he picks it up, the headline catches his eye: "FOX EXPERIENCES MIGHTY MIRACLE". A picture of Nick, so very young many years ago, stares back at Shaun.

"Great-grandpa," Shaun says, considering the sky, supposing his great-grandfather is looking down from the cloud. "Now I know why Mom called you famous!"

And at this moment, Shaun grasps the picture, tosses it into the box, and picks up the box, carrying it to the front door of the house. Once inside, his mother, Lily, considers Shaun with intent. "Shaun, what have you got there? I can smell something on you. Why are you so happy?"

"Mom, I found Great Grandpa. Look at him."

Lily considers the photo, then smiles as she looks at Shaun's gleaming smile. "Oh, Shaun. You did find Great Grandpa. You also know what's awesome?"

"What?" The young Shaun replies with enthusiasm. His mother gestures Shaun over to a small photo album, and she flips through it to reveal a picture.

In this picture, an old fox gracefully cradles a very young baby. The old fox, sporting a green tropical shirt and tan khakis, looks down and smiles in this still photo. "Who is that?" Shaun says, staring at the baby in the photo.

"Well, Shaun, that's you. Your grandfather held you two days before he died. Do you know what he said to me when he saw you?"

"What?"

"He said, 'When this little munchkin grows up, make sure you tell him how much I love him. Visit his great grandma with him, and don't stop being with him, even when you can't physically be with him. And anytime he tells you he loves you, I want you to say one thing…'"

"What did he want you to say, Mom?"

Lily considers the small pocketbook in her paws. "Read it."

After considering the handwritten phrase on the paper, he smiles. "'It's called a hustle, Sweetheart.'"