Experiment

Self-Administered Kidney Transplant.

When I was a small child, my father was a scientist - a highly acclaimed one at that. He had been a famous doctor before I was born, but his medical license was revoked for something called 'gross endangerment of a patient', whatever that was. I lived with him. I lived with my mother too, but she was never awake. She was always asleep, in a little box my father had made for her, fermented in some strange electric blue liquid. I had never seen her awake, but father told me that she talked to him. I never heard her talk.

Her being asleep all the time saddened me, but I really had no right to be saddened by such a trivial thing. If she was anything like my father when awake then I dodged a bullet in having a mother who was always sleeping.

My father liked to experiment. On anything and everything. He taught me how to dissect frogs and forced me to learn how to perform complex surgeries on animals from the age of thre. He seemed satisfied enough with my performance. I guessed that I was smart.

But when I was five experimenting on animals was no longer enough for him. He needed a more fun, more interesting subject to play with and my mother wouldn't tell him much. That subject was me. He would hold me down, running the sharp edge of the cool scalpel across my small body, detaching and re-attaching my limbs over an over again, creating long, stitched scars. I was a toy for him. Nothing more.

I felt my body being sliced open. He never anaesthetised me. Not once. He removed my organs, and I watched the dropping pockets of flesh get pulled from my insides before the world went black from pain. I felt my ribs as he removed them and I felt my father testing my newfound flexibility by bending my right over, so I was almost in an arched shape. He carved through my face and chest. But when I was eight that was the last and worst time he experimented on me.

He told me he was going to give me a brain biopsy and to lie still on the operating table in his (soon to be my) lab. I was fearful of this operation because I had seen the drill he used. That loud instrument of torture that shredded through my skull and crushed my bones. I knew I would scream, but when I did it meant that I would soon be asleep, and then I would get release, even if only temporarily from the pain.

I felt the drill collide with my head, but I noticed something strange. It was going on the side of my head, not the back like it was supposed to. And it wasn't stopping. My temples pulsated and my ears rang as the drill kept going. Going. Going.

I couldn't help but scream, opening my throat and screaming hoarsely until the blackness overcame me, taking away my pain and making me feel so so numb.

When I woke up I was no longer in pain. My head felt heavy on one side, and as I lay on the stainless steel operating table I heard the clanking of metal as I tried to sit up. I reached up to try and feel what had been done to me, and when I felt it and I froze. Paralysed with terror. An oversized screw, the perimeter of the head larger than my own skull going all the way through my neck to the other side, narrowly missing my brainstem. I had a screw. In my head. I had a screw in my head!

"Oh," I heard my father notice in a bored kind of satisfaction. "You're alive," and then with more enthusiasm "The experiment worked,"

I never knew why I did what I did next. If you asked me now I still couldn't tell you. I gripped the scalpel that had leaned precariously on the edge of the surgical tray, brandishing it tightly in my small hand. My father barely had time to back away before I plunged it into his chest, watching the blood flow and the man who had caused me so much pain die at my hand. I found myself laughing. I revelled in how fun this was. I liked this.