Formaldehyde

            All the lights are off in my room; I should be asleep.  Sleep fights disease, right?  I suppose I’m not going to be cured anytime soon then.  I’m not sure what time it is, I can’t check since the only clock in my room isn’t digital.  It has to be real early (maybe two, three in the morning?) for it to be this quiet.  I can’t even hear the nurses shuffling from room to room or chatting at their desks.  The only sound is the beep, beep of my monitors, assuring me that I’m still very much alive.  The children’s wing of the hospital is always the quietest, save for the morgue.  I’ve been cooped up in this 5x6 box for a couple of days now.  Missing out on a life that doesn’t seem to want to wait for the ill.  It’s a Friday night, so most people are probably doing something that is very different from what I’m doing.  Maybe they’re out with friends at a party.  Maybe they’re home with their sister, watching something from the vast collection of exceedingly mediocre films on Netflix.  Maybe they’re doing something more important, like writing a book that will one day be a New York Times Best Seller, or maybe they’re talking their best friend out of suicide.  Maybe they’re the one considering downing that bottle of pills.  Who knows?  All I know is that I’m not doing anything of those sorts.  I’m here.  In a hospital bed with itchy sheets, not affecting the world outside of these walls.

            I must have dozed off, drowned myself to sleep with my own thoughts.  A nurse gently shakes me awake, “Just drawing some blood, sweetie.  Then you can go right back to bed.”  I’m too groggy and half-asleep to comprehend anything.  Then I feel the pinprick in the crook of my arm and I’m immediately pulled from my blissful state of almost sleeping, to painfully awake.  And then it’s over.  The nurse leaves the room with two vials of my plasma, platelets, and blood cells.  In some lab they’ll examine it, make sure my blood count is still a-okay.  A lot of samples of my infected body are in labs somewhere.  They told me they’ll use them as a case study.  To help people in the future who have whatever sickness I have.  I swear, I have taken every test.  I have been laid under every scanner.  Not one from the abundance of doctors that have had a clipboard with a list of my symptoms has been able to figure me out.  They can’t piece together the puzzle.  My sickness still goes undiagnosed.  Maybe it’s something that hasn’t been “discovered.”  Maybe I’ll get it named after me.  My name could be immortalized, but only followed by the word disease or syndrome.