Vince felt extremely groggy as his consciousness slowly began to come back to him. Whatever medicines he had been given while here in the hospital, were still far from wearing off. He opened his eyes slowly to the dimly lit hospital room he was in. He glanced around, his eyes half open trying to focus his vision. After blinking several times his vision had finally started to clear and he was able to clearly make out the room and the objects within. The sights he saw resembled what appeared to be a normal hospital room. It was very neat and extremely clean. There was light coming in through a small window that was embedded in the closed door to his room. He took a deep breath in, smelling the sterile environment of the hospital. He noticed a window on the right side of the room that was open. The light outside the window was slowly fading as night was beginning. As he turned his head to try to look out the window he noticed how strange it felt to move his head again.
"Ohh." He groaned as he closed his eyes and moved his head to the side, stretching out his stiff neck. "Holy cow am I stiff... I wonder how long I've been here?" He said to himself.
As he opened his eyes back up he noticed something strange right in front of him. He moved his head around to confirm what it was he was seeing. Cross-eyed, he looked downward at his nose, his mouth slowly falling open at the sight.
"What in the world happened to my face?!" He exclaimed to himself.
Slowly he brought his left hand up to touch his nose. As he brought his hand up to his face, his eyes suddenly widened in pure terror. His hand was gone! He looked at the stump where his hand used to be. There was a grey stump that met a short ways up his arm to his white skin. 'Wait...!' He thought as he looked closer at the stump. It suddenly didn't look like a stump at all. As he focused in closer on his left arm he noticed that it was a horse hoof. A small, dark grey horse hoof that came from the end of his arm a short ways up and met with short white fur. '...Fur?!' He was beginning to panic. A sudden rush of absolute anxiety overwhelmed him as he threw the cover off of himself with his left arm. His breathing shallowed and quickened as he laid there, eyes wide in terror and shock, at what he was seeing.
Every inch of his body was covered in a short white fur. The only exception was his hands and feet, or more importantly the lack of them. Where his hands and feet should have been were small grey horse hooves just like the one on his left arm. He looked over at his right arm. It was very tightly bandaged and secured to his body in some kind of sling. The last thing he noticed was his tail. A bright red tail with yellow streaks in it that lay in a mess on the bed in front of him protruding from his rear.
"Oh my God! What the heck is this?!" He shouted.
He looked around the hospital room in a panic trying as hard as he could to look for some kind of explanation as to what was going on. He stopped for a moment and took a deep breath. "This has got to be a dream... There's absolutely no other explanation for this. It's just a drug induced dream from the medications I've been given while being treated in the hospital." He said aloud to himself.
With a 'click' the hospital room door flung open. Into his room walked an off-white colored pony wearing a nurse's hat. She mainly had a white mane and tail with hints of bright red woven through it. Vince looked over at the pony, his anxiety and panic all of a sudden rushing back.
"Are you all right hun?" The nurse pony said in an older feminine voice. She had a look of concern on her face as the white pegasus stared at her and began to hyperventilate. "Oh my!" She exclaimed. The nurse pony turned her head out to the hallway. "Please go and get the doctor quickly, and tell him that he will want to bring a sedative with him." The nurse said with urgency in her voice. She turned back to the pegasus in the hospital bed. "Hun, are you all right?"
Vince was speechless, frozen in absolute terror. 'What kind of nightmare was this!' He thought. He couldn't take his attention off of the nurse pony that was standing in the doorway. He allowed his eyes to wander over to the open window for a moment and contemplated making a dash and a jump from the room. He wondered how high up he was before remembering that it was some kind of fall that ended him up where he is now. He turned his attention back to the nurse in the doorway. A drenching sweat was beginning to show itself on his fur.
The nurse allowed the concern on her face to slowly melt away into a warm smile. She spoke to the scared pegasus in a very soft and comforting voice. "You should try and relax hun. It doesn't do a sick pony any good to get all worked up like this. You've already been here a week, and you don't want to add on any more unnecessary time to your stay do you?"
'A sick pony....?' He thought. 'She actually called me a.... pony...' He looked himself over again, feeling himself losing the last little bit of grip on reality that he had.
He watched as another pony came into the room, brushing by the nurse. This one was a dark yellow with a brown mane and tail. He wore glasses across the bridge of his nose as well as a white lab coat that covered his front half and part of his front legs. But what caught Vince's attention the most was the horn sticking out of the ponies' head.
'It's official!' He thought as the doctor came into the room. 'This HAS to be a dream!'
"Oh my!" The doctor stated forcing an uncomfortable smile. "Well.... It's nice to see that you're awake finally."
The doctor took several steps towards the hospital bed that the pegasus was lying in, and that was all Vince's sanity needed to snap it's last hold on reality.
"GET BACK!" Vince screamed. "I DON'T HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT IS HAPPENING HERE BUT WHATEVER IT IS NEEDS TO STOP!"
"Son, you really need to calm down." The doctor stated with a growing concern in his voice. "This kind of behavior isn't going to help you any!"
"JUST..... STAY BACK!"
The doctor nodded to the nurse who disappeared out into the hallway for a brief moment and then reappeared in the hospital room with a large syringe full of a deep blue liquid in her mouth. Vince saw the syringe and that was all he needed for motivation. He was going for the window.
Every muscle in his body seemed to contract at the same time and he forced himself to jump-roll out of the bed. He tried landing on what used to be his feet, but the way the joints had rearranged forced him to slip. He fell hard onto his back on the floor. The pain from his right arm and right shoulder came instantly and shot through him like a thousand volts of electricity.
"OOOOWWWW!!!" The pegasus screamed as he came into contact with the floor. The pain incapacitated him, and it was all he could think about at that moment aside from one thing. 'Dreams don't cause this kind of pain...'
"Oh no!" The doctor exclaimed as he and the the nurse ran over to the other side of the bed. The pegasus laid there with his eyes closed. Large streams of tears coming from his eyes. A yellow glow surrounded the doctor's horn and the syringe was enveloped in a yellow aura. The syringe levitated from the nurse's mouth and over to the pegasus' neck. With one quick motion the needle penetrated into the incapacitated stallion and injected it's medicine.
Vince felt the sharp pain of the needle entering his neck which made him cringe a bit. Soon he felt the familiar warmth of the medicine begin to flow through him. The warm feeling slowly melted the pain from his arm and shoulder away. As it seeped further into his body it brought forth a comforting numbness. As the medicine seeped into his mind he felt himself drifting into a comfortable sleep.
In a soft voice he stated. "Definitely not a dream." With that, the young pegasus lost his consciousness to the sedative.
"Come, we need to get him back into bed. I really hope he didn't undo all the hard work I did piecing him back together after his accident." The doctor said in a concerned voice to the nurse.
The doctor's horn glowed it's pale yellow color and an aura of the same color enveloped the now sleeping stallion. The doctor levitated the stallion from the floor back into the bed and carefully laid him on his back as the nurse moved his non-splinted wing out from underneath him. The nurse carefully re-tightened and repositioned the splint that was holding the pegasus' broken right wing in place. She checked over the bandaging and the sling on his right foreleg.
"It doesn't seem like he's re-injured anything doctor." The nurse said in a relieved voice.
The doctor raised a hoof to his brow and wiped it with the sleeve of his lab coat. "Phew, we got lucky then."
"Doctor?" The nurse asked in a slightly shaky voice. "I've never seen anypony have that kind of a meltdown before. Do you have any idea what might have caused that?"
"I really don't... It's almost as if he woke up thinking he were in a different world."