The Innocents

Chapter Fifteen

It all happened so quickly.

One second I was waking up after passing out and the next I was being told to undress and slip into one of those hospital gowns that almost always reveal your ass cheeks no matter how hard you try to tie it correctly. I was in a room that resembled a hospital room but I knew damn well that I was somewhere on the facilities compound. There was one of those manual scales beside a blood pressure machine with a thermometer. There a stool on wheels by a stainless steel desk that housed a containers of cotton balls, surgical gloves, tongue depressors and gauze and several bottles of iodine and other liquids of unknown origin. They even had little charts and diagrams of the inside of the human body. There was one poster behind me that showed a cartoon doctor looking rather smug and a patient on the bed looking very worried. Above it said: As long as you're my patient, the last thing you're going to do is die.

I was left alone after I had changed clothes. I felt pretty light headed so I laid back down. Then I waited and waited some more until I finally ran out of things to look at in that cramped little room and decided to move toward the voices outside of my door.

"How fast can he get here?"

"We're looking at within the hour."

"Good. Good."

A pause.

"Did you watch Run For Your Life last night?"

"Yea, geez. I just cannot get into it this season. That bimbo from Jersey annoys the living shit out of me."

"Yea, she's got a hot little ass, though."

The other man agreed and it sounded like they high-fived. Which was really gross for grown men to do especially over some reality show contestant who is probably twenty or so years younger than they were. Footsteps sound and I move back to my place on the bed.

"I want to know what's happening to me."

A nurse with a tight ballerina bun on top of her head regarded me with a pursed lip nod. She was holding a clipboard, as everyone seemed to be at all times and flipped a few pages until she found what she's looking for. She didn't look at me in the eyes. It was as if she were afraid I would turn her to stone like a Medusa.

"Full name and date of birth."

"Drew Masterson. December thirty-first, twenty-sixty."

"Are you allergic to any medication?"

I shake my head.

"Family history of blood disorders? Anemia? Excreta?"

"What? No."

She licked her finger and flipped through more papers. I watched her. She looked young with one of those turned down mouths that looked as though she was always frowning.

"I see that you haven't had any surgeries in the past?"

I jumped off of the bed, my feet landing hard. My ankles stung with the shock of my sudden weight and I moved toward the nurse slowly. She looked me in the eyes and backed up. Her look was like a deer in headlights.

"What are you talking about? Am I having surgery?"

I was, in no way shape or form, a violent person and my questions were, for all intents and purposes, legit and totally justifiable. I wasn't quite sure at the time why she was cowering the way she was. She even held up her clipboard like a shield. She was a kind person, I could tell by her eyes and even maybe a little sympathetic to my plight, but with the camera in the corner of the room behind me told me that she wasn't saying a damn word.

Two men then entered and she rushed off. They wheeled in a gurney and instructed me to lie down. When I did, they then stuck me with an iv and told me that it was because I was dehydrated which was a total crock. But I couldn't fight them. It would just make things more difficult. I was scared. I had to pee again, but they told me not to worry about it.

It's just one of the symptoms. It will go away, they said.

When a realization like this hits you, it feels like you're free falling. Everything blurs and feels really cold like you had just been set down into the Arctic tundra. All I could see were the fluorescent lights as they wheeled me away and the slight pull of the iv in my arm. I was alone. This was a time when someone shouldn't be. But here I was. I should be with my parents nestled on the sofa curing all bad feelings with sugar and bad tv. And books. And music. But I was like ice.

I didn't have much time to digest what was happening, I started to feel the effects of the anesthesia. I wanted to cry, but I was far too sleepy for that. The lights came in and out as my eyelids fluttered and struggled to stay afloat. The very last person I saw before I went under was that of Mrs. K. She put a hand on my forehead and gave a soft reassuring coo like a mother to a baby. Just a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down, after-all.

"Don't worry," she said as her face faded from view. "We're going to get rid of it for you."