Entry 2.
Warning: The following copy contains graphic features such as written words and depictions of real-life medical elements that may be distressing to some readers.
My legs gave up. I thought I can make it. I mean, how hard could it be for a former extreme sports instructor to walk down some stairs?
Yeah, well. They gave up. Both of them started to tremble uncontrollably, and as I was readying myself for the collision with the downward staircase the paramedic grabbed my arm.
He said something in Polish and just kept talking. I just repeated ‘dziękuję’ over and over again.
In my head, I thought that if I do that, they’ll be nicer to me. Other than that, I was genuinely grateful that I’m finally dragged out from this living fucking hell. Even if it’s a grumpy Polish man who’s doing it.
‘Just one more floor!’ – shouts the girl while her eyes are locked on me. ‘Can you do it?’
‘Yeah.’ I got the grumpy man holding me. What could go wrong? Let’s do this.
Inside the vehicle that old panic induced feeling started to creep up on me. Flashing fragments of memories creeped up before my vision, from the last time I traveled with an ambulance. A devil sat right next to me. His face was huffish. Enraged. Like a child who’s Christmas had been ruined.
Breathe. – I said. This could be a good time to heal that trauma within a safer environment.
Air flew through my nostrils. I got this. I can breathe. I can’t freak out right now.
‘Please wait here.’ – the guy seemed a bit shy talking in English. As I sat in the wheelchair, I knew that I’m not sitting on an actual chair.
I was seated atop of crimson agony. Horror and torment. Blood, burning, wretched, hellfire blood. Eating my body alive. Dissolving my last bits of energy like acid to skin.
I just sat there. Waiting. And waiting.
The woman seemed drowsy. I felt my soul crying out in a song. It sang of gratefulness. The woman, tired and wary, in the midst of the night with kindness unmatched, asked me kindly to sit on top of the machinery.
Blood poured out. Drenching, gushing, crimson-red blood. It arrived to a small container below.
‘How smart.’ – I thought. These people are prepared for everything.
‘I’m sorry’ – she said. Her eyes sitting in a hollowed cavity with dark circles, moved in a zig-zag motion bouncing between my body and the screen.‘But I have to.’ – The manifestation of empathy. How interesting it is to observe it among such gruesome circumstances. If we wouldn’t be here, I’m sure this woman would have great stories and laughs to share next to a cup of coffee.
She hit the spot and my insides wailed. Reactively, I shrieked.
‘There?’ – she asked. ‘Hmm.’
As I moved to the other part of the room, I observed the machinery and seated device again. I was both terrified and fascinated. This is exactly a copy of what people see in horror games.
A gruesome setting of a hospital room, with a seating accommodation covered and dripping from blood.
For a second I thought, how are they going to clean this up? Perhaps I could help.
Then I was sent out the door, and transferred through the dark halls again.
Not a soul nearby. Just tiny flickering lights. The nurse, murmuring something to herself constantly, walked fast. I couldn’t pick up the pace, even though I tried.
I have then discovered, that if I place my legs closer to each other while I take a step, it will require less physical effort to move further.
So. Even though it must have looked strange from the outside, I managed to shuffle behind her a few meters, without losing her in sight.
We arrived into an elevator. Her face, filled with pure disgust, the eyes pasting me up and down with a deeply rooted contempt.
‘Yeah sorry lady’ – I thought. ‘Even if you look at me like that, I still won’t understand what the fuck you’re saying.’
Arriving to the upper floors of the hospital complex, a few other nurses hurried to our assistance.
The woman kept repeating in Polish ‘she doesn’t understand, she doesn’t understand’.
How ironic, that I understood that though.
‘173 cm, 55kg’ – the woman ripped the pen out of my hands, as it offended her that I had to write it down. She proceeded to stare at the screen and type aggressively.
‘She doesn’t understand.’
She repeated it over and over again in Polish.
Seemingly, a shadow. My roommate. I had a hunch that she might wake up in the middle of the night to just walk by the side of my bed and stare at me.
She looked exactly like one of those people.
But… hold on. The bed. It is warm. And soft. Of course, there were some stains of dried blood left on it, but I could only feel the sympathy towards the last person who laid there and shed it.
There wasn’t an ounce of disgust in me.
I feel your pain, sister, and I’ll lay through it right now.
The white hard sheet, held me softly and tenderly. The shadow in the corner opposite me, whimpered in her slumber.
‘5:32 AM.’ – It’s probably another two or three hours ‘till the breakfast and the visit.
I was starving and wished so terribly, that I could eat. I longed for a working stomach.
I miss it so much. The sensation of what makes us human. Digesting food.
How unaware we thread through life of such complex, life-giving processes.
I curled up, as by now this was my default position. I placed my hand on my belly, whispering to it, praying quietly.
It is still, paralysed. Frozen. Dysfunctional. The skin was hardened and static. Almost, as if it were dead.
What makes me human, an important element, removed.
The pain spiked to its heights. My body and soul, immobilized by agony. My eyes stared at the ceiling blankly.
My soul spoke up. It was surprisingly calm.
It offered a debate.
‘Am I… dying? Am I going to die?’
‘So, this is how it actually feels like?’
Then I imagined. The pain stops, and I depart this earth. Oddly, this time, it wasn’t a frightening idea.
At that very moment of maddening pain, the thought of non-existence arrived as redemption.
How strange. To be introduced to my life-long fear in such different coating. This could change things…
The morning has arrived.
‘This is definitely too much people. It is going to be really humiliating. But, I don’t have much choice. Just handle it with grace.’ — I said to myself.
The doctor, a typical sociopath, with a shaved head, curved nose, and condescending voice addressed me.
‘Only English? Well okay. Wait outside. We will perform the …’
The rest of the sentence got lost in his mouth. The people behind him, staring at the floor. All of them were young and well dressed. Students, trying to impress the doctor, just by existing.
Some of them tried to stand close to him, to imitate an exclusive attention to the patients.
Other girls compensated with heavy makeup. It really looked like some of them dropped in here, in front of me right from a club.
‘Outside where?’
Fuck.
‘Where do I have to go?’
His shiny head appeared among the crowd. Oh great. — I got him.
As I climbed up to the familiar seat again, I wanted to say — hey they’ve examined me already— but even listing my symptoms, I couldn’t finish, as the baldhead interrupted me and instructed his students to circle around me. I knew and saw very clearly that he just wanted to get over with this. Hence, the other half of my symptoms remained unknown to the medical staff.
As I opened up, the young boy in front of me turned pale. His red-framed glasses compensated his white face quite firmly. Before I could develop a sense of deep shame, being forced open and bleed severely in front of a young guy, the woman inserted the devices.
I wailed and forgot that there are people looking at me.
The process repeated. We all moved to that other room, me leaving a blood-trail behind me.
Te woman inserted another device. I cried out in pain.
The baldhead grabbed the device, and looked deeply into my eyes.
‘What is going on here?’ — he asked, with a sarcastic grin on his face, almost as if he would be lightly entertained by the current events.
‘It hurts a bit.’ — I said faintly.
‘Just a bit, just a bit…’ — grinned the baldhead, as if he would think that my agony is but theatrics.
Deeply enraged, I wished heavily to have more energy. To destroy this man’s ego in front of his students.
‘We will not have to cut you up, but it has to be removed.’ — he said, while maintaining the eye contact and the sarcastic presentation of his facial expression and words.
‘You will go home today and later return for the surgery.’
‘The pain.. what about the pain...? — The question faded away in my drug-infused mind as I walked out of the hospital. The whole tram ride felt like a journey above ground.
As I moved, I knew that my feet had already ascended the soil. I walked a few inches above it.
*
The days are passing by. At this point I can’t exist without painkillers. I haven’t been able to take the trash down either. But maybe this medicine this old doctor recommended could help me digest? Maybe.
I need to go outside. But how? I can’t even stand up to walk to the kitchen to grab the meds.
How am I going to do this? And what’s happening with me? Why am I not getting better? Why the bleeding hasn’t stopped yet? Why is the severe pain getting only worse and not better?
Why is this all happening?
The thought crept in again, although this time I am static.
‘What if I am going to die?’
What then?
*
The doctor, hyperfocused on the ultrasound.
‘I’m sorry.’ – he said as well ‘But I have to.’
*
‘I will call the ambulance for you. They will probably do an emergency surgery on you.’ – I don’t think I can ever forget that man’s face.
After all, he was the one explaining to the paramedics with precise medical accuracy what is happening, and according to my theory, that is why I got this kind of urgent care. And… another chance in life.
All thanks to this one worried internist, at Luxmed Medical Clinic.
