Kurt was woken around six the next morning by Nurse Miller, one of the younger nurses, with orange juice and cream of wheat. Coffee. I want coffee. Kurt thought. And some real goddamn food. He hated being up this early, especially because he hadn't slept well the night before. His back still ached nearly constantly and the slow healing bed sores burned and itched making it extremely difficult to sleep. God I really wanted a cup of coffee, he thought. The food brought by by his nurses was invariably bland and childlike, and now that Kurt was feeling better he was quickly becoming bored of it. It was a good sign he supposed, but that didn't make the food any more interesting or palatable. When Nurse Miller turned towards him to feed him another bite of the cream of wheat he mouthed to her COFFEE.
"You want coffee eh?" she giggled. "I'll bring you some once you're on the ward, how 'bout that." He gave her a smile and a mouthed thanks and took the bite she had offered.
"When you're done with breakfast we're gonna start moving you to your new room, how does that sound?" Kurt smiled.
"Good! Now it looks like you'll have your own room for a while, that should be nice, more privacy." Kurt didn't particularly know how to feel about that. He was growing somewhat lonely, seeing only nurses and family, but he also didn't particularly relish the thought of being stuck on a children's ward. Because most victims of polio were children, the largest polio ward in Ohio was at Akron Children's Hospital where Kurt was among the older patients. The hospital had a general ward for polio patients who were young adults, but adult respiratory patients were generally in their own rooms. Not only did it sound profoundly boring to primarily interact with eight year olds, it seemed unfathomably depressing to spend his days watching small children struggle with the crippling and painful lasting effects of a microscopic virus he had come to hate with a passion. It was bad enough to experience it himself, it seemed awfully cruel that the virus mostly struck children. He'd had a chance at a childhood, and at a good education, but children who were crippled had no access to any of that. The world wasn't built for men like him, any more than it was built for the poor children who filled the polio wards. There were many people that this world wasn't built for, Kurt thought.
The nurse offered another spoonful and he took it, wanting desperately to be able to talk. To ask for something different to eat, or a book to read, just to be able to tell the nurse that he really needed the toilet right about now. Fuck he thought, fuck everything.
Within the hour, not long after Nurse Miller had finished giving him his breakfast, a team of nurses and orderlies came in to begin the long process of moving him out of isolation and into a room on the respiratory ward. A machine was rolled in, but Kurt couldn't really see what it was except that it had long rubber tubes attached to a mask which was placed on a cart beside his head. It was the same machine that had kept him breathing during Dr. Gowen's examination after his lungs had failed him. The group didn't really talk to him except to tell him to stay calm as he was taken out of iron lung to be washed and have all his virus contaminated clothes removed to be burned. It felt nice to be really washed and dried all over, but where the iron lung did its best to mimic normal breathing, the portable respirator did little but shove air down his throat. It was uncomfortable, even painful. He looked up at the young man working the machine and realized it was the same medical student who had kept him breathing during his second spinal tap. He had a funny name Kurt thought, trying to remember. From a book maybe? Yes Dr. Gowen had called him Watson. In a few years he'll be Dr. Watson, Kurt thought, smiling to himself. Maybe he's got some holmesian lover back home. Kurt smirked under the mask, thinking of the man going home to an old Brit smoking a pipe in a victorian sitting room. He tried to make up funny backstories for each of the nurses as they moved him around , making his muscles ache almost unbearably as they scrubbed away weeks of filth and dead skin. He had had a several quick wipe downs since he was hospitalized, as well as a hair wash but not a full sponge bath. It hurt horribly to have his limbs lifted and moved, but it also felt good. He tried to take his mind off the pain of it, imagining strange and funny stories about each nurse in turn.
I'll bet she gets the paper with her curlers in he thought looking towards Nurse Miller. And I'll bet she's gets that red lipstick on her teeth, looking towards a blond young woman with lipstick which did not match her skin tone. Girl, get me out of here and we can go fix that color, he thought, while simultaneously wondering what his increasing proclivity for imaginary conversations said about his mental status. Just what I need to be he thought, nearly rolling his eyes, crazy as well as crippled.
"You doing okay?" Mr. Watson asked, bringing Kurt back out of himself.
No, Kurt thought, I feel like crap, I'm exhausted, I hurt, and now my throat hurts from you shoving air down my throat. But he just blinked once. He knew Watson wasn't really talking about how he felt, just asking whether he was about to faint from lack of oxygen. Which he wasn't, so by that measure, Kurt supposed, he was okay.
Soon enough the sponge bath was done and Kurt was transferred to a stretcher. By that point he was so exhausted that he barely took in his surroundings as he was changed into a clean t-shirt and striped hospital issue pajama bottoms. His hips hurt, his legs hurt, his back ached. Even his lungs ached, partially from the harsher breaths caused by the portable respirator, and partially because his lungs were beginning to feel the strain from not being able to cough. His chest felt tight, like he was coming down with a cold. In fact, it was the feeling of the buildup of fluid which Dr. Carmichael had discussed. Kurt managed to perk himself up a bit as he was wheeled down the hall and into an elevator. He had never been in an elevator before and the feeling was unlike anything he had felt before. Almost as though his stomach had left his body, but it was strange more than unpleasant. He almost hoped he would get to ride in it again, a childish ray of excitement passed over him. There hadn't been many moments of joy since he got sick.
Feeling happy simultaneously felt impossible and as though he was betraying himself by not allowing himself to be happy and just get on with life. It wasn't entirely unlike how he had felt after his mother died. His father had encouraged him to get on with life, even when it felt as though any kind of life without his mother was impossible. Perhaps it wasn't so different, he thought. He had lost something. Even if he recovered completely, which became less likely with every day which passed, he would be changed forever. He had only been acquainted with the land of paralysis for a few weeks but he knew that it had changed him. He had had to deal with being completely dependent on others for everything, including being able to breathe. That soul crushing dependance was something he didn't yet know how to grapple with.
He had been on the precipice of independence. Saving up enough money to move away from small town life with its small minds to New York, where he could be whoever, and whatever he wanted to be. Where there were streets where it was rumored men could hold hands in public. There were rumors to of bars and clubs where you could dance and kiss like everyone else. Now he couldn't sit up let alone dance. Since Blaine had been drafted the hope of a future together in New York City had been his comfort. He occasionally wrote Blaine letters under the name "Karen" detailing his hopes for their life together. He had given the return address for his friend Sara who had often covered for him and Blaine during high school in exchange for Kurt taking her to school dances. Sara had little to no interest in dating someone who wanted any kind of physical affection, so Kurt was in many ways her ideal man. Someone who would discuss the most recent Steinbeck novel and go to the shops downtown, but who didn't expect petting sessions in return. In high school they had been best friends, and once Blaine left for the army they spent nearly all their free time together.
Because Sara knew his and Blaine's real relationship he had felt free with her, more able to be himself. When they were alone he didn't have to constantly suppress the more flamboyant aspects of his personality and when they were in public, the fact that he was out with a girl helped ward off at least some of the comments surrounding his sexuality. He hoped that now that he was out of isolation she would be able to visit. Only she and his step-brother Finn were aware of his and Blaine's relationship, and that hadn't been by their choosing. Finn had walked in on them once and had been sworn to secrecy. It was the kind of secret many families had. Brothers who left for San Francisco or Chicago or New York and never wrote again after being disowned by their families and threatened with electroshock treatment. Men and women who knew they could never love each other but married out of friendship, or for want of a family, or just to throw off suspicion. Or else men and women who lived in loveless marriages, their spouses always wondering why they weren't ever good enough. "Bachelor" uncles and "spinster" aunts who lived with "friends" sometimes for decades. Sometimes with the whispers and rumors following them, sometimes managing to avoid suspicion by always seeming to be dating a different girl.
That was who Kurt had hoped he and Blaine could be, "bachelors" who lived together as best friends. With only those closest ever knowing there was so much more than friendship between them. Now that future was called into question. Perhaps it would be easier, with people seeing him as a cripple, something most saw as sad and distinctly unsexual, Blaine would simply be seen as a kindly man who cared for a crippled friend. But perhaps Blaine wouldn't want to have to be with someone he had to spend his life caring for. There was no place for a wheelchair or a respirator in New York nightlife after all. Kurt wasn't even sure he could sleep with his lover anymore. It was just all a fucking mess. It all made him feel even more trapped than he already did.
And it wasn't just feeling trapped in his own body either. It was feeling as though his one way out of had been stolen. There was no way he could travel to Manhattan in an iron lung. What West Village apartment was equipped with a generator for an iron lung or space enough for a wheelchair? The thought of Blaine having to care for him as he was now turned his stomach. Whatever the opposite of sexy was, that was how he felt now. The thought of the man he had lost his virginity to having to turn him in bed, was more than he could bear. Kurt stared at the slowly moving hallway ceiling above him blinking back tears. He missed his lover with an intensity of pain he couldn't begin to describe. As much as he felt embarrassed and ashamed of his body he wanted Blaine by his side. He wanted Blaine to kiss him and tell him everything would be alright, even if it wasn't true.
He had met Blaine in tenth grade, when Blaine had moved to Lima Senior High School after his father passed away and he had had to leave his private school to help his family save money. The two had become fast friends, bonding over the loss of a parent and over a feeling they didn't yet know how to name. The names queer, fairy, and fag, had always followed Kurt, but he suspected that Blaine might have avoided them if they hadn't been so inseparable.
They had known each other for nearly a year before they had first kissed. It had been perfect and terrifying and exhilarating all at once. They had been together ever since, each other's first and only lovers. It nearly made Kurt's stomach turn to imagine Blaine seeing him like this. Splayed out on a stretcher, arms and legs limp, breathing through a bag and pissing through a tube. It all felt like a violation of his body. The virus had been a violation, an invader. Changing his body in ways he could not predict or control. It wasn't just the thought of Blaine seeing him paralyzed which upset him. It was the thought of him seeing him vulnerable in a way which he couldn't control. They were intimate and vulnerable with each other, but it had always been on their terms. This all became mixed up with feelings of shame at the entire hospital seeing him wheeled through the hallways in his pyjamas and only covered with a thin sheet. He felt as though he were on display. Up until his illness he had always felt proud of how he could in a way choose how people saw him. It had become a defense mechanism, if he felt pride in how he presented himself he couldn't be ashamed of it even when others wanted him to. Now he had no control over what he wore, what he ate, or nearly anything else. He didn't even have a say as to when and how his body was stripped and put on display for the benefit of his doctors and nurses. It didn't matter that they treated him well and were only there to help him, what mattered was that he didn't have any say it how any of it happened.
Soon Kurt felt the stretcher come to a stop, he turned his head as much as he could and saw one of the attending nurses open a white door with a circular window cut into it. The door had a tin plate marking it as Room 305. The door had been labeled with his name, and had something which looked like a schedule pinned under the label. As he was wheeled in he heard whooping from behind his head where he couldn't see. It sounded like Carole and his father. It made him smile, despite himself. He knew they wanted to make him happy, to make him feel like he was getting better and that this could be some kind of normal. He wanted to be happy in order to please them, but he wasn't sure he could manage it.
Though he couldn't move much because of the mask over his face, he managed to look around the room a bit. It was prettier, certainly more inviting than his room on the isolation ward. He had been too sick to care about his surroundings during the majority of his time in isolation, but once he began to feel better, the sickly green walls and tiny window had felt quite depressing. His new room was much more inviting. There was a large window on one wall which looked out onto the hospital grounds and the tree lined street below. The window had cheerful white cotton drapes, and the walls were painted an equally cheerful shade of pale blue. The room was more fully furnished than the isolation ward as well. Besides the new iron lung, there was a small dresser and set of shelves, a sink on one wall, two carts stacked with various medical supplies, a hard backed chair, and an armchair for visitors. Kurt smiled further when he realized his father and step mother had brought some of his things from home. There was his mother's vase, with flowers on the dresser, the radio from downstairs, and several books from his room and a few other bits and bobs to make the room feel more homey. It did make him feel less lonely, knowing that his surroundings would be at least a bit familiar. In a moment his father was above him, squeezing his hand just as Kurt began to be lifted from the stretcher and into the iron lung. Within a few moments the machine was on and he was breathing more comfortably. While Carole left to talk with Kurt's doctors, his father pulled the chair beside Kurt so they could see each other.
"Guess this is a start, huh?" his father sighed,
Yeah, Kurt thought, though of what I don't know.
