Part 123 New morning


The sun presses through the blinds as I open my eyes. I am still here. The hospital is here. I look to my left and see the machines that monitor my vitals. I listen to the whirring sounds they make, the rhythmic pattern.

I realize this was the “Arabian chanting” I heard last night.

I am greeted by a new nurse, Tia has gone home. I am in private room on the ninth floor. This would be far too high up in the building to have heard street music anyway. Anyone playing it loud enough to blast nine floors up outside a hospital would have been arrested on the spot.

I am told that I have been monitored for many days in the intensive care unit on the third floor, and that I have been very sick. I have suffered from complications from the surgery to fix my esophagus, and the extensive pain medicine that was pumped through my system to help me survive all this produced some vivid hallucinations. I will be alright, though. In time.



Part 124 Back in the world


The major drugs - the ones that caused my brilliant delusions - have left my body. I can think more clearly with each passing hour. I am very tired and weak. But I feel immediate relief and much gratitude that I am still in this world.

In the next several days I sit propped up in the hospital bed, scarcely able to move without assistance. My eyes constantly look toward the breathing monitor, praying to see a reading at least in the mid nineties. When I see numbers approaching 100, I literally breathe easy, knowing I am still around.

The doctors and nurses and technicians come by my bedside, usually only stopping briefly and asking how I am doing. I respond feebly, as if they have ignored the obvious and are just being polite. A technician introduces himself and tells me he only needs a few minutes for an x-ray. He slides a plate under my back and wheels a large machine over me. True to his word, it is briefly over, and he exits. Someone will repeat this process periodically for days, sometimes waking me in the middle of the night to do so.

Becah spends hours by my side, the constant in a stream of characters that come and go. She talks to me and gradually I begin to understand what has happened…