I saw your review request and took a look at your story, I Nearly Died. I hope you find my comments helpful.

First lets look at the characters:
The narrator, or hospital patient: The reader never knows his/her name and no description is offered other than he/she is in the hospital with pneumonia.
The nurse: No description of the nurse is offered.

The reader has to know something about a character, otherwise, why would a reader care what happens to that character? In this scene the reader only see's the words of the patient, but those words are disembodied. Is the patient old, young, male, female, anything?
Same with the nurse. Who is she? Young, old, fat, thin, anything to give the reader a sense of who and what the characters are is important.

Setting:
A hospital room. Nothing more is offered. Is this a modern hospital or a ward in a third-world country? A setting is important to a reader so they can 'see' the story world.

Showing vs Telling.
With the exception of one sentence, this story is wholly made of narrative. There is no showing, only telling, which detracts seriously from the piece.

Showing allows the reader to use their own experience to conjure the scene the writer is presenting. If you do it for him the reader cannot get invested in the scene. A glowing white uniform to one reader may be something different than the same glowing uniform is to another, requiring each reader to use their personal experience to visualize the scene. This is how a reader becomes invested in the story.

You wrote, telling: A nurse wearing her starched white uniform played havoc with my mind and why I lay strapped to this hospital bed.

Showing: Watching the nurse hurry through her duties, her starched, white uniform aglow under the harsh fluorescent lights, I pulled at the restraints holding me to a hospital bed. What am I doing here? I asked myself.

You wrote, telling: Tubes had been inserted down my throat and nose that entered my lungs. One tube pumped oxygen into me and the other was there to suck fluid from my lungs. I could tell this much when this same nurse came to pump the one tube as she told me to cough. Which ever so slowly got all of the fluid out of my lungs, something of a miracle because I had come so close to dying of chronic pneumonia.

Showing: Two clear tubes snaked across my chest and disappeared into my mouth. The hiss of flowing oxygen told me one tube provided oxygen to my lungs, the clots of mucus flowing slowly in the other tube was a sign that my lungs were being purged of pneumonia.

Structure:
A double space should appear between paragraphs.
Your scene is made up of several paragraphs, but it is presented as one long paragraph.
Many of the sentences are much too long and should be broken into two smaller sentences. ie.
A delusion that she and two other people she had tried to introduce me to were here to harm me was all that my mind could comprehend as I lashed out at her with my feet, the only part of me that was not tied down to this bed, however comfortable.

The above run-on sentence should be broken into 2 or 3 shorter sentences.
A delusion that the nurse and the two other people in the room were here to harm me filled my thoughts. I lashed out at the nurse with my feet, the only part of me not tied to the bed.

A sentence of dialogue should be it's own paragraph. ie.

Instead of this: The other two people in the room I recognized as my dad and my brother. “I guess you know who these people are.” Of course I knew, but didn't trust anybody at this point, not even family.

It should be this: The other two people in the room I recognized as my dad and my brother.
"I guess you know who there people are," the nurse asked.
Of course I knew, but didn't trust anybody at this point, not even my family.

I hope my comments are useful. I think this is a story that you want to tell, and with some work you will have told a story that many people will want to read.

Bikerider








My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .