Final Report
2023
I am screaming as I’m holding onto the railing just so they won’t take me down the stairs to the basement. A huge nurse picks me up and brings me down anyway. All around me are doctors and my parents. Everything is light blue and green. The basement is unsettling. I remember the operating room. The elevator is old and creaky. The hospital wards are separated, on the outside there’s glass and small chairs in front of it. I’m always so scared here. There are coats on the hangers. My mom is at the nurse’s station. The bathroom is in the back and it always has that hospital smell. Haste, yellow, red, blue. I try to hide behind my crib so they can’t examine me. Mom sleeps on the chair next to me at night. I feel very bad, it hurts and I wanna go home. The nurses are running around, routine check ups. In the beginning I was afraid of blood tests but now I watch as they stick the needles in me.
Usually everything is very hard. Ever since I was small I always feel like everyday is a fight that I will never win. My condition is constant and the doctors can’t say anything concrete about it. Ever.
If the party is on the third floor, I can’t go. If Google Maps says I have to take the metro at a stop which has no elevators or escalators I have to replan my whole journey.
When I was in kindergarten the kids knew I had some type of medical complications and that’s why I don’t play in every game. When I went to school and started first grade I made sure that no one knew that I was any different than everyone else. Of course this didn’t solve anything, I just got better at hiding it.
It went like this up until last fall when my boyfriend at the time broke up with me, because it was too difficult for him to deal with my hardships. Suddenly my whole world fell apart, the one I thought loved me said everything I feared the most to my face. After collapsing completely I started to deal with it by looking at myself from afar, from an analytical perspective.
I realized that even though these procedures brought back very painful memories to me, they had beautiful visuals. The footage mesmerized me, their strange movement and the way they pulsed. My dad used to take pictures of me when I was in the hospital. I never really understood why he did that and this was the first time I’ve really seen them.
This feeling will probably never pass but I guess it helps if I accept its existence.
