Bedsheets. Funny how when you've been in the hospital long enough they feel like a prison. You can't leave them, if you do the nurses will punish you. Of course, that's only when you've been in the hospital as long as I have. When you're new everyone's friendly and nice. The nurses must not like it when you stay too long. Maybe they have some sort of meetings in which they pick and choose when to stop being nice to someone.
Granted, as of now the punishments are, "no television for the next hour," or some kind of strict talking to. It's not just punishments though. The nurses have gotten used to me being here enough that they drop all nice acts as soon as they enter my room.
They must find nurses in Hell.
Some of the nurses are nicer though; they usually send the nice ones to the people who are going to die soon. In this hospital you know you're going to die when thenice nurses start coming into your room, and if you live here long enough you learn to know which ones those are.
The door to my hospital bed opens and I look to see who it is. It's Edna, one of the nicer nurses, but not quite nice enough to be telling me that I'm going to die. That's nice, I don't plan on dying today. She closes the door behind her. She's never closed my door before, but I've heard that it's not a good sign. Dang it, she's bringing bad news, maybe the nicer nurses are busy and Edna's the best they could do.
"I have good news and bad news," she says to me. Her voice is curt, like she just wants to stop talking to me now.
Edna has never liked being the one to bring bad news to someone.
"What's the good news?" I ask. I try to be as apathetic sounding as possible, but on the inside I'm quite nervous.
"You should be leaving the hospital on Wednesday, you know, if your heart condition doesn't get any worse," she says. Today's Monday, and considering the fact that I've been here for months, the fact that I'll be leaving the day after next is amazing.
"Woohoo! So what's the bad news?" Nothing could bring me down now, I'm leaving this demonic hospital! I can go on a pokemon journey! I've only waited for six years more than every other kid.
"Well, if your heart rate goes over 135 beats per minutes it may become overworked, causing it to stop pumping blood. Because of this you will not be able to put much physical strain on yourself, be overly surprised, overly stressed, or overly exited." Looks like I spoke too soon.
"So I can't do anything ever again? Isn't there some kind of surgery you can give me?"
"The physical ramifications of having surgery are often not worth the benefits or having surgery to being with, so we try to refrain from using surgery whenever possible."
"And because of budget cuts."
"Yes, those too, I guess."
"So basically I can't have fun anymore, right?"
"I never said that."
"But what the heck am I supposed to do to pass the time?"
"That'll be for you to find out." She winks at me before leaving the room.
"Yeah, wonderful. Beware young Axel, fun is lurking around every corner! Fun is dangerous! It'll kill you in your sleep! It murders young orphans and puts the dead bodies in the river to hide the evidence!" Joking to myself about the situation makes me feel a little better, but, of course, I can't help but feel down hearted at the news. Enda walks back into the room.
"I'm sorry, I completely forgot to give you this," she says, holding out a black watch for me to put on. I take it from her and put it on my right wrist.
"What's this for, to remind me to make the most of the time I have left to do nothing with my life?" I ask.
"It's actually a heart rate monitor. The technology to take a heart rate from the wrist has been recently improved dramatically, so why not put it to good use?"
"So I should watch this and if it gets to 135 I should stop doing whatever I'm doing?"
"No, you should stop at 120 or so, 135 would be putting you right on the edge of death."
"Sometimes I feel like I'm already halfway dead."
"Well, you'll be out of the hospital soon and you'll be able to live your life again."
"As long as it doesn't involve fun."
"I wouldn't say that."
"I have a question, I know going on some kind of epic pokemon journey is out of the question, but can I pick one up from Professor Juniper? I don't even have to pick it up, my parents can do that and bring it home."
"It seems like you'd be pretty happy to have one; thus your heart rate may increase, and you could die." I give her a doubtful look. "I'm kidding about that part, but pets can do some crazy things sometimes, and what if it does something that increases your heart rate past the max? Or what if your pet dies? Then your heart rate would increase due to stress. Truthfully, it's best for you to have as few social connections as possible. That way when you die you impact less people and less people's death impacts you." For once I'm glad that I don't really have any friends.
"Right. Wait, what if my parents die, then my heart rate would increase too! We should ban me from having parents!"
"I assume that you're joking." I nod, even though it was mockery, not joking. I'm sure she doesn't really care about the difference between the two. "Good, you know as well as I do that your condition makes it quite difficult for you to look after yourself."
"Yeah, I'll never be a self-reliant person, that's fine, it's never having a pokemon that's going to tick me off for the rest of my short life. How long do you think I have anyways? If I have a weak heart then doesn't that mean that I'll die sooner than normal?"
"You know a lot about all of this, don't you? I was hoping on telling you some other time, to spread out the bad news over the course of a couple days, but it seems that that hope is dead and gone. I'd say that you have around ten years left, though I wouldn't bet on it."
I thank Edna before she leaves again, she seems to be in a hurry. No one ever said that being a nurse was easy, I guess.