Basium Mortis

 Antsy. Like ice cream in my pants(y). I feel like I am zinging and buzzing. Full of hyperactive energy. Pop. POP. Bubble. Whizz. I want to "Scream at the top of my lungs what’s going o-ON?" Too buzzing to read the paper, and this airless, soulless hospital waiting room feels like there is stiffing me. It literally feels like there is not enough oxygen in the air, or air the atmosphere.

To my left are three large windows looking out on to a scene of urban regeneration. Lush green trees; thick, dense with myriad shades of green foliage. The rich, varied shades of green set against the sheer, stark dark glass façade of the modern minimalist, industrial architecture. Behind the reflective, repetitious panels, one can just about make out the glare of florescent office lighting. The far left of the scene is more interesting in many ways. It is a scene under construction. A towering red crane working on -one presumes- a building that looks startled and naked with bare grey breezeblocks exposed to the elements. Vulnerable. On closer inspection each floor is numbered in big blue figures,

2

 

3

 

4

 

5

Gazing quite intently out of the 3 large windows, which so happen to be above a row of seats in the stagnant waiting room that contains me. In one of these seats, sits a woman who seems to find it profoundly strange that I should be looking above her head and out the window. She keeps giving me strange looks.

Abruptly awakened from my urban daydream by, “45… number 45?”

“Oh that’s me!” I say snapping into consciousness; revealing the sweaty ticket concealed, crumpled in my palm.

“This was please…” I am lead into one of the many cubicles separated by curtains and sat down by plump, friendly nurse. A young girl in a pink shirt, blue polyethylene apron, and cream slacks sits next to me. She has long black, thick wavy hair reaching down her back, the tips brushing against her rump. She looks about 15. Anxiety levels within start to climb; my heart starts to hammer a little faster in my chest:

Da-dum

Da-dum

Da-dum

“Hi, I am a volunteering here today, would you mind my doing your blood test for you?” I alarmed, this person looks like a child, and she does not even work here!

“Umm… are you qualified?” The girl laughs,

“I am trained, don’t worry.” I am worried.

“But are you a qualified phlebotomist?”

“Yes, I am qualified. I am just volunteering as a phlebotomist in this hospital.” I feel reassured. The nurse in the next cubicle chuckles,

“She is qualified, it’s Okay” she chortles.

“Yeah, Okay then, that’s fine, as long as you’re qualified. It is nice of you to volunteer.” I hand this cherubic faced pillar of the community my bloody test form, she looks at it and glances up at me trepidation clouding her angelic expression. She gets up and goes over to the nursing station to ask them something about my test. Anxiety rises again. She really does look very young. What if she knows? Perhaps she thinks me a monster.

Angel-faced-child phlebotenist

“Just one” I read from the lips of the nurse she is speaking to. She returns to me, any dread wiped clean from her face and replaced with a virtuous smile. It is now that I notice the specially designed blood-test-seat is set up for the (volunteer) phlebotomist to draw blood from your left arm. There goes the anxiety again, stronger this time, bubbling up like sulphuric acid, wearing away at my resolve. I hate having blood taken from my left arm. It is impossible not to notice the plethora of scars adorning the soft, pale inner surface of my for-arm. All pale pink or white now, and mostly faded with age but visible none-the-less and remarkable in their multitude and evidence of self-injury. I detest when strangers ask me about them, and I have received comments from phlebotomists before.

Da-dum

Da-dum

Da-dum

Then as she is fiddling with the tourniquet and getting out the cylinders with which to store the blood fresh from my veins, I notice that she has similar scars to mine, not as many but in the same place and almost certainly inflicted in the same way. I immediately feel calmer. I release my breath, long and deep, which I had not realised I had been, waiting for the dreaded uncomfortable don’t-know-how-to-answer question. It is strange that I should feel so reassured by the evidence of some one’s once emotional suffering. But it does, I know that she won’t say anything, as she will have lived with the same shame, the same disturbed looks, invasive questions and awkward moments. I have had hundreds of blood tests, and hundred of these awkward moments, and not once have I felt such an affinity to the person testing my blood. It feels like we are in some way connected by our troubled histories.

Judgement

As usual, it takes ages to find my veins, which are irritatingly small and deep below the surface. Once she finds a vein, I look away, not wishing to see the needle puncture my skin, and the thick, viscous, crimson substance passing through the plastic cannula into the clear Perspex cylinders, labelled with my personal details. As I look away, I notice how surreal it is to have boxes upon boxes of people’s blood, each packed with neat rows, fit snugly against each other, deep red with the contents of other people’s veins. The DNA of hundreds of people stacked like tinned food on supermarket shelves.

The needle hurts more than usual, it feels thicker, I am definitely going to get a bruise. “Are you all right?” The unnervingly fresh-faced woman emptying my veins asks.

“Yeah it just hurts quite a lot.”

“Almost done” and sure enough, soon it is over and I am holding a tiny ball of sterile cotton wool against my bleeding perforation, stemming the flow. It still hurts; I feel mildly sick and feint but I am relieved it is over.

*

Salvation

Just as I was imagining my stunning, expansive view as I sailed out of the window, an Olympic diver shrouded with shards of glass, as droplets of chlorinated water, I was brought back to reality with a thud. Or rather a crash, it felt like I had just hit the curb of Euston Road in a violent and bloody collision, when I opened my eyes and my phlebotomist was standing, ahead of me, looking both morose and terrified, clutching a gas mask over her mouth and nose. I noticed that the waiting room that had been bustling with life at the ellipse of my suicidal daydream was now starkly empty and devoid of movement.

Her apologetic eyes did nothing to stop the scene around me melting away. Tunnel vision narrowing into only whiteness, pain and a distant a humming, like a wasp trapped in the case of a florescent light bulb, tempted to doom by the luminescent tube, trapped never to find a way out of their plastic tomb, searching frantically, destined to eventually cook alive.

I vomited.

When things came into focus, again I was on a hospital trolley in restraints. I looked desperately around me and sighted ahead an isolation room, sterile, devoid of natural air and light. Surrounded by brave, stoic doctors, cloaked in protective clothing.

Too late to escape

“KILL ME” I screamed, “Kill me, PLEASE? Don’t do this to me. I know now it was me, and that I am too dangerous to near you, or any one. But don’t keep me here, alive, like a laboratory rat, caged. Please?” I was suddenly consumed, overwhelmed with guilt for the people who had died. The people I had killed. The poor soul under my train, my mum, my dear old mum, Michael, good strong, sweet Michael, my Mickey, I always knew I would end up hurting him, but I never, ever thought it would be like this. And Rory, my little Rory. I started whaling, sobbing, screaming, it was carnal, base, incontrollable, immutable all consuming misery, grief and guilt. It swept over me, like an icy wave, smothering me, choking me. I was drowning. This would kill me, surely this hideous; suffocating pain, the pain of knowing it was me. I had killed them, killed them all, not Rory not my little Rory, it was unbearable. How could you destroy something you loved so much? I willed, hoped, prayed, wished, with every molecule of my being to die there, then, on that trolley. I did not.

*



 Pills, tasteless hospital mush, more pills, blood test, more “food”, more pills. That was my day, occasionally a nurse would come and ask me how I was doing, but I didn’t want to speak to them, or anyone, I just wanted to cease existing.

*

As the medication began to take effect, my certainty dwindled. I was less and less sure of how I had wound up there, I knew that they were dead, sadly, that remained true, but how they had died became unclear. I was so sure that it had been me, my fault. I had deduced it must have been my kiss of death, my curse, that killed them. But it made less and less sense to me, how could I have killed them? They had not died at my hands, or even of a common cause. The ward seemed to change before my eyes also. My isolation room, shifted form until it because simply a private room in ward full of other female patients. The nurses attending to me wore less and less protective clothing, until they appeared in regular nursing uniforms. Eventually my desire for answers outweighed the feeling that my body was made of concrete and I ventured out onto the ward, through a living-room-type-space with a few listless women, staring vacant, eyes clouded with medication. I wondered if I looked like they did. There was also I tall woman, covered in tattoos, wearing surgeon’s scrubs and lurid pink high-heels, her peroxide hair scraped back in a messy pony tale, shaved off at the sides. She craned around to look at me; she appeared gripped my mania, various metal studs protruding from her face. She could have been pretty.

“What are you looking at?” She crowed across the room.

“N-nothing” I stammered, my voice horse and foreign sounding in mouth, it had been so long since I had spoken to anyone. I found my way to the nursing station and asked to speak to the person who was in-charge of my care. A corpulent, beaming black woman, with cobalt blue nurses uniform straining against her expansive middle responded kindly,

“Follow me, this way, in here precious,” she said pushing open the door to a small room with two big, plastic coated easy chairs and a desk. “Take a seat then.” I perched on the edge of the one furthest from the door, unsure of what I was here to ask her. “What can I do for you?” I sat there in silence. Nothing made sense, and my head felt clouded, like it was full of dense fog.

Talking Therapy

Over time the fog cleared and the stark reality of what had actually happened in over the last few months became more and more visible, as haze of my mania thinned and eventually subsided all together. Now the truth, my truth, the truth that I had been so certain of, seemed to more and more absurd, in clarity that the lithium bought. Talking helped me to make sense of things, and boy did I talk, once I started, I just couldn’t stop, there was so much darkness inside me which I need to let out, so that it would not consume me again. Every day I would talk to Trudy, my kindly cobalt-blue nurse. She helped me to understand that the truth, the actual truth; that had been too horrible for my brain to handle, so it had fractured and constructed an alternate reality to take refuge in. A reality, in which I had killed my loved ones, killed them by kissing them, by loving them. I had convinced myself I had some mystery virus in order to explain away things too horrible comprehend. I had not killed them, of course, I hadn’t, there was no virus, no kiss of death. Just tragedy. They were still gone, and though I did not know how I would function with out them, I had no choice but rebuild my life, alone, brick by brick.



Brick by Brick

~*~



The very few of you that read my blog regularly may notice that this is a continuation of a previous post. I turned a descriptive passge into a short story for my English cours, I hope that you like it and I welcome any feedback.



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