ENG - Fractured Fates ʰʸᵘⁿˡᶦˣ

17

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Throughout the night shift, I struggled with an unpleasant numbness in my hand that gradually spread to my elbow. Now I was home, illuminated by the soft morning sun filtering through the cracks in my blinds. My shift ended just under forty minutes ago and about twenty minutes ago I found myself tired and exhausted in my own apartment.
Somewhat awkwardly and with a feeling of helplessness, I tried to undress, as it turned out to be more awkward with only one hand. But somehow I managed it and finally had my sleeping clothes on. Stressed and with a hint of desperation, I blew my blonde hair to the side, which hung wild and untamed in my face and blocked my view.

I shuffled back into the living room to grab my cell phone, which was on the coffee table, and then glanced towards my open kitchen. Should I eat something? My stomach wasn't really growling, but I hadn't eaten since yesterday afternoon as I'd woken up far too late and would otherwise have been late for work. But I didn't really feel that hungry either.
I thought about it briefly before deciding to have a snack after all so as not to put my body into complete withdrawal. But as soon as I took the first step towards the kitchen, it felt like there was no floor beneath me. I stumbled and just managed to catch myself with my left arm to avoid crashing face first onto the floor. Confused, I turned around to see what had caused me to fall. But there was nothing to see.

As I tried to stand up again, I realized with a shudder that I could no longer feel my right leg and had therefore fallen down. With a soft curse that echoed in the silence of my apartment, I tapped my fingers against my leg, but it remained silent and unresponsive. Discouraged and feeling helpless, I hung my head and slumped backwards onto the floor. "You could at least have waited until I was in bed," I mumbled reproachfully to my numb leg.
My left hand reached out for my cell phone, which had slipped out of my hand when I fell, but it was out of my reach. Of course, I could drag myself laboriously to the couch or even to my bed, but I had absolutely no desire to do so.

As I lay there on the cold, hard floor, looking at my living room from this unfamiliar perspective, I realized how desolate and empty it was - so empty and impersonal. My gaze wandered over the sparse furnishings: a lonely couch, a plain, bare table in front of it and a sideboard on which a television tried in vain to bring some life into the room. In one corner stood a plant that had seen better days and its once green leaves were now covered in a sad brown color.
My walls were painted in a monotonous, sterile white that nipped any attempt to create a sense of coziness in the bud. There weren't even any pictures hanging on the walls to break up the bare surface and give the room some personality.

As I lay there thinking about my apartment, I realized that my entire apartment looked like this. Compared to Jisung's apartment, which was colorful and cluttered to the point where you could barely move freely and was bursting with life and warmth, my apartment seemed even more depressing. Jisung's apartment was a place where you felt welcome and safe, whereas my apartment was as cold and lifeless as a tomb.
But what good would it have done to furnish and personalize it? It would have only made me sadder to see pictures together every day, knowing that one day I would leave these people and they would be left sad and abandoned.
Once again, I sighed deeply and closed my eyes as I continued to lie on the floor, which was so cold that it froze the marrow in my bones. Fatigue slowly crept into my body and I felt it dragging me to sleep. Finally, I surrendered to it and fell asleep on the cool floor.

At some point, I was woken from my sleep by the shrill ringing of my cell phone. I slowly opened my eyes, which were still foggy from sleep. I didn't immediately realize where I was and looked around tiredly as I slowly sat up. I immediately felt pain in my back, which shot through my body like pins and needles and made me whimper. I patted myself on the lower back as I remembered that I had fallen asleep on the floor and immediately regretted not at least dragging myself onto the couch.
Eyes half open, I looked in the direction the ringing was coming from. I went to grab my cell phone with my right hand and wondered why I didn't see it until I remembered that I couldn't feel it right now. I looked at my arm and grabbed my hand again, feeling my way up to test where the numbness was going, to see if it was getting less or even more, as in this case. This time I couldn't even feel my upper arm and right shoulder.

In the meantime, the annoying ringing of the cell phone had stopped, only to start again shortly afterwards. Completely irritated and with disheveled hair, I somehow dragged myself towards the annoying device and received the caller with an angry: "What?" There was an oppressive silence on the other end of the line before I heard a quiet, almost hesitant, "I'm sorry." It was Jisung. "I woke you up, didn't I?" he asked cautiously, his voice filled with apologies and concern.
With a deep sigh, I lowered my head and shook it, even though he couldn't see it. "I'm sorry, Ji. What's up?", I asked as I tried in vain to suppress my tiredness. "Actually, I wanted to ask you if you wanted to go downtown before our shift? I want to get a haircut and need your advice," he asked, and I could hear the burgeoning joy in his voice, which contrasted with my own mood.

A tired smile flitted across my face as I tried in vain to move my right leg. But it wouldn't budge. "I'm sorry, Ji, but I'm afraid it's not going to work," I muttered quietly as I pushed myself off the spot with my left leg. I pulled my leg towards me to push myself away with it and let my butt slide across the cold floor until I reached the couch and leaned against it. "Why?" my best friend asked worriedly. "Do you have company?" he added jokingly, and I knew he was just trying to lighten the situation.
My eyes wandered around the room again and I sighed again. "No, not that," I began quietly. "I can't feel my entire right side anymore," I finally admitted meekly. "WHAT?" he shouted in my ear and I instinctively held the phone slightly away from my ear. "I'll be right over," he called out loudly, followed by a beep.

With a slight smirk that expressed more sadness than joy, I looked at my cell phone and shook my head at his reaction. Less than half an hour later, Ji stood in front of me in the living room, which was now lit by the midday sun through the slits in my blinds, and helped me by supporting me and sitting me down on the couch.
He had a spare key from me, so he got in without any problems. "How long has it been since you noticed anything? Everything was fine yesterday, wasn't it?" he asked me immediately, his voice trembling with worry.
I shrugged my shoulders, only one of them lifting, and looked down at my feet, which looked like foreign objects. I wiggled my toes, but only the left ones moved. "Yesterday during the shift it was just my right hand and as soon as I got home, the leg too. By the time I woke up, it was up to my shoulder," I explained briefly, earning worried looks from Ji that reminded me of a deer in headlights. "Do your parents know yet?" he asked, already taking his cell phone out of his pocket, ready to call them.
I swallowed hard and shook my head. "Not yet," I mumbled meekly.

Jisung stroked my back with a gentle, almost tender gesture, but the warmth of his touch only partially penetrated as I only felt sensation on one half of my back. My mind raced as I bit down on my lower lip, which was slowly reddening from the force I was exerting. Inevitably, the thought came to me that it could soon be over for me. I wasn't afraid of death, but I hoped that when the time came, it would be quick.
While I was lost in my thoughts, my best friend called my parents with tears in his eyes. They got here in record time, and their faces were lined with fear and worry. My mother immediately came towards me, crying and hugging me tightly. Her warmth and familiar scent enveloped me. I touched her shoulder in a desperate attempt to comfort her and whispered, "It's all right, Ma." A smile I didn't really feel flitted across my lips as I met her worried gaze. My father stood by, his eyes full of worry and helplessness as he looked at me.

The day dragged on gloomily and endlessly. My parents took me to the hospital, where they ordered every test imaginable. New MRI and CT scans, blood tests and much more were carried out, only to end up sitting in front of the supposed specialist again. His voice sounded like a death sentence when he told us that my condition had worsened - again.
My mother burst into tears as she did every time, and since that day, my condition had been getting progressively worse. It had only been three days and I could no longer feel my second leg. I only had the left half of my upper body and my left arm that I could move. My father put a catheter in me as I could no longer even control my own bladder.

As if it wasn't bad enough that I had to use a wheelchair to get around my tiny two-room apartment, I was also in unbearable pain. Pain that I shouldn't even feel, as 80% of my body was paralyzed. And yet an incredible pain shot through me, especially from these paralyzed areas, which made me flinch every time, as if a lightning bolt was going through my body.
My mind knew it was just phantom pain, but my body seemed to stubbornly ignore the fact. Countless tears welled up in my eyes every day as the pain became unbearable. This was compounded by an unbearable nausea that forced me to bend over the ice-cold ceramic of the toilet bowl several times a day and vomit until my stomach emitted nothing but a hollow echo.

When I wasn't busy pressing my cold, sweaty forehead against the ceramic of the toilet, I was convulsing in my bed, drenched in sweat, trying to endure the pain as any kind of painkiller was as ineffective as a drop of water on a blazing fire.
It felt like someone was ripping my intestines out with brute force, only to stuff them back in and rip them out again in an endless, cruel cycle. My body burned like fire as the fever continued to rise, yet an uncontrollable shaking shook me.

Every day my mother was by my side, the circles under her eyes were evidence of sleepless nights, her hands holding mine were cold and trembling slightly. She tried to be strong, but I could see the fear in her eyes. When my father and Jisung weren't at work, they spent every spare minute at my house and even stayed at my bedside to support me. Everyone thought that I would soon be over. Nobody said it out loud, but you could see it written all over their faces.
They really wanted me to go to hospital and stay there, but I stubbornly refused. If I was really going to die now, then at least I wanted to do it in my own home, because the treatments for an unknown illness were useless anyway.

Once again, I hung over the toilet and threw up in pain. But my stomach was already more than empty. Jisung stood next to me, his eyes full of worry and fear. He held my hair back while he stroked my shoulder reassuringly - a gesture that was so familiar and yet so helpless. When I finally calmed down and sat up, I wiped my mouth and tasted something metallic. When I looked into the toilet, I knew what it was. I had vomited blood, dark, scary evidence of my deteriorating health.
"Okay, that's enough Felix, you need to go to the hospital now," my best friend said, his voice breaking as he lost control. He was already digging his cell phone out of his pocket, but I took it from him. "No," I said in a broken voice that was barely more than a whisper. "You can't tell them, Ji." He looked at me in shock, his eyes shining wetly in the dim light.
He took my face in his hands, his touch warm and comforting, and he turned it gently in his direction. "You're out of your mind! You're deteriorating rapidly. Something has to be done about it. I can't just watch," he said, and the tears began to run down his cheeks like a desperate river of helplessness.

A tired smile, tinged with pain, flitted across my pale lips as I shook my head slightly. "Please, yes? Every visit to the hospital only raises unfulfilled hopes in them. I can't bear to see them suffer any more because of these false hopes," I explained with the last of my strength, my voice just a whispering echo in the cold, sterile bathroom.
Jisung let go of my face and continued to cry, his tears dripping onto my fragile hand. "This is so fucking unfair," he mumbled, his voice breaking as he hugged me tightly. "Why does it always have to be the good guys?" he asked me tearfully and I could feel his shoulders shaking.
I knew he was right and that I had to go to hospital, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I didn't want to end up in a hospital room surrounded by machines that kept my body running while my mind slowly gave up.
I gently pushed him away from me as I felt incredibly sick again. With the last of my strength, I managed to get the nearest blood from inside me into the toilet bowl as my body writhed in pain.

This whole procedure dragged on for two agonizing weeks. Two weeks in which I suffered from hellish pain that made me feel every second of my existence. The nausea whipped through my body and wouldn't even let me keep water down. My body was getting weaker and weaker, as if it was slowly saying goodbye to the world. I was suffering rapidly from the pain, I lost at least ten kilos in weight and my skin was so pale that I could have been declared dead just from the lack of color.

The only time I wasn't being cared for by my worried parents or my best friend were the moments when I fell into a restless sleep or when they thought I was asleep. In those moments, I thought of all the missed opportunities and all the things I could have done if only I'd had the courage. All the things I didn't dare to do for fear that they were too dangerous for me or simply because they were forbidden by my parents because they thought it was too risky.
I suddenly regretted turning down the countless offers from my best friend when he tried to persuade me to go on some trip again, but I didn't want to because they were too far away from Seoul. So many missed opportunities to enjoy the rest of my life to the fullest. Instead, I worked tirelessly to pay off the huge amount of debt my family owed me. I didn't regret working hard to relieve my family, and yet I wished I could have enjoyed my life a little more.
Jisung was right: I was too uptight. If I was going to survive this, I really should turn my head off and start having fun. The risk of dying didn't just increase because I went to a party with him or went out of town for a weekend. It was purely my own fear and the fear of my family.

My thoughts were interrupted when my mother quietly entered the room, her eyes red from hours of crying. I quickly closed my eyes so she would think I was still asleep. I felt her sit down by my bed and gently stroke my hair. Her touch was tender and loving, but it couldn't dispel the chill that was spreading across my skin.
"My darling, you have to fight. You have to be strong," she whispered to me, her voice breaking with every word. I could hear how much she was suffering, how much she wanted me to fight, but I just didn't have the strength to answer her anymore. I didn't want to fight anymore, I just wanted to be left alone.

The longer this state dragged on, the more I thought myself that I was going to die soon, because it definitely felt like it. I've been in these states before and had these phantom pains and numb limbs, but it was never as bad as it was at that moment. It did go away eventually and I was able to carry on living normally, but I could very well do without it. So if I didn't die this time, I had to take into account that this condition would return.
Over and over again.

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