Patient

In class, we learned how to do emergency first-aid from CPR, tying slings for broken arms, bandaging fractured ankles and elbows, supporting fractures and broken bones, covering head wounds, neck wounds and even eye, nose and ear injuries. I volunteered to play patient and received most of the first-aid. 

As I sat across the soft-white-thin sheets of the patient bed in the cool air of the room with a neck brace, arm in sling, eye taped down, head bandage, splinted knee, and soft baby-blue booties—the class had told me I really did look hurt.

As the class continued with first aid on others, I thought about how it must feel to be in a real hospital with its beeps an busy feet moving across sterile floors, really injured and surrounded by others who were injured, hoping to live, or just waiting to die. I thought long and hard about it, and I thought that maybe that’s where I should belong—laying in white sheets of a hospital bed in a cold room with the smell if sterile sadness and false hopes in the air, holding onto unwanted life and waiting for cold, cold death.

Although the injuries I bear to have are fake, and class has been ended over hours ago, I do not wish to remove any of the bandages and wraps that hold me together. At this point, the bandages and slings feel right on this body.

My peripherals are now limited to only one eye due to my “eye injury.” Having bad eyesight already as it is, my sight is almost useless to me at this point.  The left arm that I use to eat and do two-handed tasks with now lays lifelessly limp in a sling of white wrapped around my neck. Only one arm and a hand held close to my body is left to accomplish whatever tasks I need done. 

It’s sick, I know, but it feels right. Maybe I really should be stuck somewhere as a patient for thinking of things like this.

It feels like this is the way I should be.