When I woke up, I remember hearing a lot of voices. Blurred frantic voices that came from all around me. My eyes focused on the room around me and when I saw the white, I knew I was in a hospital. Even worse, I was on a stretcher with tubes coming from my nose and the walls kept whizzing by. I had to shut my eyes because I was getting dizzy.
From then on I just felt what was going on around me and I tried to concentrate less on the movement of the stretcher. They were pulling it pretty fast.
I felt myself being lifted gently onto a bed and I opened my eyes. The walls were still but there were people staring at me again. Doctors and nurses peering down at me expectantly.
“Where am I?” I asked. I really did want to know where I was. This felt like the same hospital I’d been to before; there were a lot of pretty nurses.
“You’re in L.A. in the…” I didn’t hear the name of the hospital, but I was happy that I was so close to home. I’d forgotten that were on tour here, so that’s why it came as such a surprise.
I closed my eyes, but I didn’t fall asleep; I just wanted the doctors to go away. They did go, but they waited a little while as if to make sure that I was actually sleeping. Maybe they wanted to say more, but I didn’t trust doctors; they worked for the money, I thought.
Right after they left I heard more people enter the room. I opened my eyes and saw another man getting wheeled in. My little bed was next to the door against a wall and the man was put behind the curtain next to me.
I also noticed that the room was pretty full. All of the beds were taken now, from what I could see. They sure weren’t picky where they put the people either; there was a poor little baby that should have been taken to pediatrics, and a pregnant woman.
The man they had just wheeled in was completely drunk. I could even tell, and I’m not very experienced with it. My bodyguard got drunk twice in the hotel when I was sick, but you could hardly tell.
“Whass diss booton do?” he asked when of the nurses. I could only imagine him pressing the button after he asked. He seemed like that type of person. Oh, and if you need a translation, he said ‘What does this button do?’
“That calls the other nurses, but could you please lay down on the bed?” she asked it very nicely, like nurses are supposed to, but he refused. The second time she asked, I could hear him push her. She fell against the curtain between us and I got scared that the drunken guy would see me.
He ran around the room, but he didn’t get to my bed because he fell down. I saw the nurse go outside to get help and apparently so did the man. He went and laid down on his bed, pretending like nothing happened. Maybe he was hoping that they would make a mistake.
And, as it turns out, they did. Since the nurse refused to go inside because of that guy, two people who didn’t know which one of us pushed the nurse barged into the room.
I had my eyes shut, but I could see in my mind the two guys ruling out the pregnant woman and the baby. Somehow they concluded that I had done it and they approached me.
“Let’s get him before he wakes up,” one of the guys said to the other. I was too tired to open my eyes or to even move so I just let them do what they wanted to do.
They tied me down to the bed, which didn’t have any impact on me because I couldn’t move anyway. I opened my eyes and tried to wiggle my fingers, but to me it didn’t feel like they were moving.
Suddenly the drunken man gave up his little game and leapt out from the curtain. He startled the men tying me down and they pulled too hard on one of the straps. It didn’t actually hurt, but I yelped a bit anyway. They loosened their grips automatically, but they were still staring at the man.
The man was a lot of words; a few of them were: filthy, horrendous, scruffy, drunk, disgusting and buck nude. Yeah, the guy had stripped down to nothing and it was so gross. Especially for me, because I couldn’t turn my head. I tried closing my eyes out of fear of being seen as a pervert, but they only closed enough to make it look like I was squinting.
The man got close to me and I could tell that he thought I was looking on purpose. I mouthed at him to go away, but he just came closer. He knelt by my bed and told me that we were going to become very good friends. The man’s breath was foul and his hair reeked like cigarettes and piss. I’m sorry if that’s gross, but now you know what I went through!
He leaned really close to my ear and I could have bitten him if I wanted to, but I was afraid that I would get AIDS. His body was incrusted with these infectious patches of skin. Some of them were even bleeding and oozing with puss.
The guy got so close to my face that I thought he was going to do something gross, but he didn’t. Instead, he said, “Real good friends.”
Before the two useless guys could catch him, he had taken of towards the pregnant woman across from me.
“Chan ah squeeze the beby, ah’ve nevah see somevone geeve bath to ah deed beby befah,” he told her, laughing this creepy laugh. Translation: Can I squeeze the baby, I’ve never seen someone give birth to a dead baby before. Pretty sick huh?
The woman screamed when he tried to touch her. I think she kicked him down low in defense because he hollered so loud that I wished I could’ve covered my ears. The two men meanwhile where busy untying me and apologizing frantically.
The two guys tackled the man even though he was already subdued. They brought him back to the bed and tied him down. Somehow that didn’t really comfort me. I kept thinking that he would break through the bands and come and strangle me in a drunken rage. Then again, I was the one he LIKED, ew, ew, ew.
I couldn’t sleep that night; I just watched the shadows dance across the ceiling and listened to the baby holler all night. The man didn’t say anything and I wondered if he was even awake. Sometime after I thought that, I heard him snore and concentrated on getting some sleep for myself. It never came for me, partly because I couldn’t close my eyes and partly because the baby was screaming so loud. Rok can have the children; I don’t think I’ll be able to deal with their night moodiness until they’re two.
At about 7am I actually got some rest. I was woken up an hour later by the man, who was shouting loudly for everyone to wake up. Last night I hoped he would become sober, but I guess he wasn’t drunk after all. Maybe this was how he always was. That thought sent chills down my spine.
I tried to get back to sleep, but when I did, about ten minutes later I felt someone breathing down my neck. When I opened my eyes, I wish I hadn’t. The man was hovering over me and his blackened face almost made me puke.
I gasped and moved away from him. Amazingly, that little bit of sleep I’d gotten worked wonderfully and I could move again.
“You’re so pretty when you sleep,” he told me. I nearly puked all over him; I was so completely grossed out. Instead of telling him off, I tried to get away from him. I moved so that we were on opposite sides of the bed and looked at him angrily.
“What’s the matter? Can’t you talk?” I didn’t answer him; I gave him the evil eye. He looked really shocked because he took a small step back.
“Look about last night, okay, I was drunk, they got the wrong person. You can’t blame me for that.” I wasn’t going to take that; I wanted him out of my face.
“You can’t judge me like that. Besides, last night you liked me.” I hated the way he referred to “last night.” It was… well think about it. When I shook my head furiously at the last comment, he tried to look sad.
Then he tried to change the subject. “Hey, we share a bathroom, isn’t that…” he shut up because I’d picked up my pillow and threw it at him. Maybe it wasn’t the best judgement, but I wouldn’t let this guy play me for a fool.
After that, he didn’t bug me all day. I waited for someone to come and visit me or the doctor to say that I could leave, but nothing like that happened. Whenever a nurse came in, I asked them why I was here, but none of them knew. I hoped that no one saw my tumor, but that was the case. They must have seen it when they cut off my cloths.
I didn’t want to think about that possibility. Instead, I thought about my “Larger Than Life outfit,” that was the one they cut off. It felt like a loss to me somehow. I almost missed it; in fact I grieved it more than the loss of my great aunt. For a while it was strange to me, but I figured it out. If no one comes to visit me and care for me, then why should I grieve their losses?
I couldn’t eat any of my meals and I had the nurses worried. “I know you don’t feel hungry, but you need to eat,” this one nurse told me. But I just couldn’t; I felt stuffed even though I hadn’t eaten in a day. The nurses kept on trying to please me by finding better food than I had on my tray. I finally agreed to eat an apple and that satisfied them until lunch.
The thing that I found strange was that now that I was in a bed all the time, I didn’t feel sleepy. I tried to sleep but every time I was close to it, someone woke me up. Whether it was the nurses, the man, or the baby, I was constantly kept awake. The only person who didn’t make too much noise was the pregnant woman, but that was because she was trying to sleep; like me.
After a couple of hours I got bored of trying to sleep and looked for something to do. No one brought me my bag so I couldn’t even make my hair. I thought that they’d forgotten about me. They better have called my mom, I thought. At least she would be worried.
The man kept things a bit lively for me. In one way I would have liked to get rid of him, but he was fine while he was far, far away from me. He talked to himself, and sang to himself, I guess because he was bored too. After a while, I think he got smart and found out a way to bug me without talking to me. The bathroom we had to share was in my chamber, so he lumbered into the chamber and pretended he really needed to use the bathroom.
“Don’t tell me I can’t use this bathroom!” he shouted, “it’s our bathroom, remember that!”
I did remember that, unfortunately. The man stayed in that bathroom for a very long time, trying to annoy me. First he rolled up wads of toilet paper (I knew it was toilet paper because the roll it was on squeaked) then he wet them (I heard the sink) and threw them into the toilet hard as he could. He was trying to make it look like he was taking a major dump.
Then the guy tried flushing the toilet and the wad of toilet paper got stuck and clogged the thing. The man swore (to enhance the performance) then stuck his hand into the toilet to pull it out. There was water splashed everywhere; I could hear it hit the floor in great big smacks. It reminded me of the ocean smacking onto the shore somehow.
That was at least the funny part. Then the guy started to get really disgusting. It wasn’t a good thing, believe me; he’d gone too far. He splashed some more water about of the toilet then said really loudly, “This is perfect bath water!” Immediately after he said that I pressed my call button frantically. I had to get out of there.
While I was waiting the man did something even nastier. He opened the door a crack and tossed his clothes by my bed. I’d turned around because I was afraid that he would attack me from behind and I saw him do that.
That man had a tick about losing his clothing. It was so gross that I leapt out of the hospital bed and waited by the door for a nurse to come and rescue me. When I walked, I noticed that my foot hurt even more. I looked down and noticed that my foot was twice the size of my other one. It was all swollen and red and I knew that it was an infection. That foot was quite painful to walk on, so I hopped most of the way to the door.
I looked behind me also, because it felt, well, airy, in the back. It was wide open in the back because I was wearing one of those hospital gowns that exposed a lot. Since I didn’t have any clothes to wear underneath, I had to hold it shut with my hand. I was just glad that the pervert was too busy splashing the toilet water all about in the bathroom.
The nurse finally arrived and she agreed to take me away in a wheel chair on one condition: that I ate a meal. I had to agree, and I did so quickly.
Instead of taking me to the lounge area or the cafeteria, she took me to the nurse’s room. While I struggled to eat, I talked their ears off. I guess I was really lonely before. But all of that got ruined for me twenty minutes later.
Chapter 11
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