Originally Posted by Non Serviam

Here's how I'd re-draft the first half or so of this. (I've re-ordered a couple of the sentences too).

Do you see this as an improvement? Or have I chopped out something you feel is important?
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My hearing returned first, but it seemed limited. All I could hear were the sounds of my own body. My heart pounded like it was about to explode. My breathing rasped and my ears rang as my adrenaline levels peaked.

Then my sight came back. I lay face-up staring at the stars as they swam into focus. Deep, piercing pains began to shoot through my body. I rolled over and tried to stand, but my left arm gave out and I almost fell on my face.

I was lying in a puddle of some dark, thick, sticky substance. A flashing light approached, and I glimpsed the bright red color of the puddle beneath me. It was blood!

At the sight, pain rushed in, like I was that kind of kid who falls down and doesn’t start crying until he looks down and sees the blood from his wound. I knew I better figure out what happened fast, so I jumped to my feet.

An excruciating pain ripped through me, like a thousand needles thrust into my right leg. I managed to keep upright. ...

Originally Posted by bpastermack

I actually like my version better personally

Originally Posted by Violent Messiah

Heh...of course you like your version better, bpastermack. You wrote it, and the writer that takes rewrites of their work with a genuine smile are a rarity. I can take it, but only if I truly believe it works better.

Once I had someone rewrite a scene in a sample of a cyberpunk sci-fi I was working on. The guy's version was extremely different from mine and didn't really work. Why, you may ask? Because the guy that rewrote it didn't really know the genre at all, and his specialty was high fantasy. So gone was my urban gritty dialog and in its place was that kind of prose you expect from lords and elves and the like. Plus, where I could describe a scene with 'verbal economy' and get the point across, he took three times as much excess writing where it got to the point of being padding. I took like two sentences to describe one of the protagonists sitting in a chair with a med pack to heal her leg, and his version was a full paragraph plus. Yikes.

Anyway, bpastermack, you might want to get used to people suggesting severe changes to your story if you want to be published. Editors can be ruthless.

Oh, and I agree with Non Serviam about the "I woke up" now that I sit down and recall how many stories I've read that began that way. I never really thought to dissect it like that and look for deeper meanings for using it, but it actually makes sense the way he puts it. Something to consider.