Linksshifter II

I And My Armor And I

May 21st

They are letting me keep a diary in here. I'm glad – there isn't anything else to do. Nothing to do but wait – this is an isolation treatment and nobody can come in, and they certainly aren't going to let me out. But I didn't have a choice – the doctor said that if I didn't do anything, my bones would all lock up within the year – it was that bad, that fast. And I didn't have the money for a normal hospital – nobody would in Trench Town – so when the Prevotella doctors asked, of course I said yes. There was nothing I could do – nothing but come in here and take their treatment.

I wish Victor could be in here – he was heartbroken when I left, and it hurts like anything that I can't see him, can't call him, can't tell him that I'm fine. This is an experimental treatment, they say, and I'm afraid – if I could just lean on him, have his arm here to hold onto, I'm sure I would be fine. But he's not, and I have to be strong without him – I have to be strong for him, to make it work and come back out in one piece.

It's so strange in here – I've been in hospitals before, but it wasn't anything like this. The rooms are all spotless, sterile, shutters instead of curtains – it's like the bed and the counters and the fittings are molded out of the same stuff as the floor... which is some kind of heavy plastic that feels hard as concrete. The door is made out of the same stuff – or the same stuff wrapped around a heavy steel core. I get the shivers just looking at the lock on it when it's open – I just hope nothing happens that they'd have to lock me in.

May 22nd

Somehow, I'm back here, back in one piece – if I look in the mirror, I can recognize myself, barely. Those are my eyes, that's the mole on my shoulder. But that's it – they shaved off my hair, not just on my head but on my eyebrows, everywhere – they had me under sedation for what they said was one of their tests, one of their admission exams, so I didn't feel them doing it. My hair is gone – I can't barely process that, and then there is everything else.

From first thing in the morning, they started with a doctor examination – gowned up, mask and goggles, like I had Ebola and not a problem in my genes that's going to make my bones lock up – he sounded white but under that, you can't tell. He asked a lot of questions about medications, about drugs – I couldn't catch something that I might have had prescribed, might have taken at a party, except maybe once in ten. Until my back started to knit up, I'd always been pretty healthy, and I never did a lot of strange drugs out. Then he started on traditional medicines – and there were a lot of those too, most of them I'd barely heard of from my grandmothers, almost none I'd taken, been near. And then there was a whole bunch of stuff that I couldn't recognize as anything – allergies or such to like every animal you have on the island, some you don't – questions about what brands of curry spice I use, the least little thing, no rhyme or reason to it, about Victor and his history. Then they undressed me and put me out, for what they said was a magnetic scan – at least they had a woman doing that, at least, even if she was also under a gown and mask and didn't hardly talk at all.

When I came around, my hair was gone. I was wearing a hospital gown, lying on my front, on a bed not in my room. My back felt strange, like someone'd cut me open with pins and rubbed pepper juice into the wounds – so many of them, all over – I tried to feel for them, to see what was wrong, and my arm was stiff – so stiff I couldn't reach back behind myself. There were large needle marks in that shoulder, in the other one too, into the ball of the muscle. I don't know if this was a test or the start of the treatment or if I have to do this all tomorrow again or if it's over, and I couldn't make anyone tell me. They just rolled me back up on my feet and walked me back to my room, and my back was hurting worse than ever – the bones inside, not just the skin on the outside, and my knees were stiff like I couldn't move them right. It can't be happening this fast – this has to just be some kind of effect of the medicine – of whatever they put in me.