St. Jude's Hospital
Montana
June 2008
In No Particular Order
Sometimes... it's easy to be myself.
Dave Mathews
Screaming.
Tiles are pressed up against my face, cold and gritty; I can see dried streaks from excess floor wax left on the runner boards: frozen drool, yellow and hard.
Batman camera angle. Along the bottom edge of the cabinet I can see them.
They're screaming.
They opened him up.
And something came out.
It was just a cold and stomach cramps… there was no reason to be here really. The doctor wanted to run a blood test, just to be sure.
The same old same routine. Check in to the emergency room, wait two hours, read the mags, watch the soaps, soundless on the tv high up in the corner. Couldn't get that stupid song out of my head. Get dragged into a back room, jabbed, given a cookie and some juice. Wait, sit there with my forearm stained with a urine-yellow daub of iodine.
That's when the fluorescent overhead light started to shout at me, my abdomen twisted with pain, and my eyes attempted to relay to my brain that there were only one door, not three.
As per usual, I didn't listen.
But I think I caught on that I didn't just have the flu.
Screaming, they're all screaming and I can't do anything.
No, they aren't screaming. They're all lying on the ground, still not moving. Blue aprons dot the floor across the hall. From my angle, they look like a landscape of rolling cerulean hills.
Slightly rumpled hills. With blood on them.
But they're still screaming. In my head.
Something on the operating table is moving. I can see the trolley legs wobble slightly.
Sometimes... it's better to be somebody else.
Lights flashed, one by one, across my vision. The sound of the creaking trolley sounded like an alien cry, over and over, bleating, squeaking. The inside of my eyelids were pink with bright green spots smeared across them. I could hear the patter of a dozen hospital slippers running along beside me. A mask on my face, condensation dripping onto my lips. Couldn't move. The air was sweet cloying.
I don't know why I was still awake.
Minus two points for taking a corner too fast. The force tilted my head to the right.
My eyes opened.
Big boots. Black and yellow rubber thudding across my sight. I think I can hear shouts, but they are drowned out by the screaming that only I hear. At least I can't hear that song any more.
One pair of boots stops by my face. Knees, thigh, crotch, jacket, hands, mirror. The hands pull the mirror upward. Ah, a gas mask. Oh look, it's Mister Fireman. Hello, Mister Fireman, how are you?
His mouth is moving, but I can't hear anything. He pats my shoulder and stands up, gesturing to others. They are all running about.
Well, they were.
Now they're falling too: the firemen are falling, helmets spinning, rolling away across the floor.
Screaming.
They were wearing gas masks, now limp and rotting on the floor, a dozen truncated animal snouts, seemingly trying to crawl into the throats of the screaming men. Dying men.
Operating theater, I was across from an operating theater. They parked me across the hall. I could see in through the door as the nurses talking to one another. My nose itched. The fire in my gut… I couldn't feel it, but knew it was there.
There was an old man on the operating table. Fractured leg, the rushed words drifted across from one of the nurses. Shock, malnutrition and more techno-babble. Appendicitis… They were trying to get me in there first. But I could see the nurse press the needle of the IV into his arm.
I could see her spinning backward, spraying the air with the saline fluid. It splattered against the ceiling. The others ran towards her, grabbing for her. As they run, an elbow catches the edge of my bed. My trolley topples over: the ceiling, wall, and floor streaking by. Sometimes... it's easy to be me.
I hit the floor.
It doesn't matter, I couldn't feel anything.
A nurse ran to me, but just like the others, she fell silent to the floor, retching and clawing at her face.
I tried to call out to her, but the blue-green stickiness of the oxygen mask was still wrapped around my nose and mouth.
I think the anesthetic is wearing off, my legs are all pins and needles and I can feel my drool pooling in the mask at the base of my chin. I remember dreaming, but not sleeping.
The yellow and blue heaps are clearer now, I can make out brown hair jutting from under the cap of the nurse who came to help me, can see her wedding ring on her left hand.
I can make out the twisted expression on her face. The blackened lips. Crusty brown-red eyes, dripping slime green puss.
I close my eyes.
Black shoes. Not penny-loafers or the kind with laces. No, the really expensive Italian kind, the ones Jana always promises to get me for my birthday. There are a dozen or more black shoes scuffing and shuffling about now, all clustered around the main operating table.
I feel something give inside of me, a organic snap within my stomach. The pain slams me upside my head; my back arches upwards as I spit something up. My numbed arms clutch around my intestines as my appendix eviscerates.
They see me now.
As my eyes fill with tears and white light, I can see a hand pulling off my mask.
I can hear myself screaming. It matches the sound in my head.
Open up my head... and let me out.