HEAL

Chapter Seven

(unedited)

It was a breezy morning in Bala, the soothing type that has the possibility of making one snuggle tight to a blanket and waking up late.
   Since it was her day off, Aaisha planned to crawl into her bed and have a post-Fajr sleep but she couldn’t sleep and after almost twenty minutes of twisting and turning, she got up from her bed and resorted to reading some Arabic Literature but she couldn't concentrate, she was just staring down at the black prints unable to grasp what it reads because her mind was spontaneously drifting to the session she had with a patient the other day.
     She was in the General outpatient consulting and was done attending to one patient and awaiting the arrival of another patient. And on seeing Hassan enter the room instead, she guessed he was probably there to do whatever a computer science graduate is supposed to do in a hospital which relies on paperwork for all its operations. When surprisingly Hassan sat down on the chair facing her and clumsily placed his hand which had the hospital card on the table separating them. She realized her guess was wrong and he was her next patient.
   He nodded curtly to her to which She responded to by giving him a small smile and saying "How are you Hassan?"
  "I'm good thanks for asking" Hassan replied back.
  "Well at least today I expected you to remember to ask about how I'm doing also”. She said.
   He gave a small chuckle that didn't quite reach his eyes his eyes to this.
    "I'm sorry" Hassan replied back to Aaisha not with the with a sigh.
  She sat up straight and her expression became more serious as she said, "so what is wrong?"
   He shifted uncomfortably on his chair and folded his hand together while looking down at the table but didn't answer her.
  "Hassaaan?"
   He hesitated before saying in a barely audible voice, “You don't know what is wrong with me, you will never know."
   “If you don’t want me to know what is wrong with you, how come you are here, sitting on a chair meant for my patients and holding a hospital card?”
  He stared at her with a blank face as if she was referring to somebody else and not him.
   “God! This is hard”, Aaisha thought to herself. She was about to say something when she heard him say,
  "I been finding it hard to get good sleep, that’s the least of my problems though, you just write those drugs that helps to fight insomnia for me and I will be on way."
   She smiled a little and said, “it doesn’t work that way, I can only prescribe drugs after I know the cause of your insomnia, maybe you might not even need drugs after all.”
    He heaved a sigh and said, “It’s not that I can’t sleep but the moment I close my eyes, I keep having scary dreams and its so bad right now that I am hallucinating about those dreams.”
   "Nightmares and hallucinations”. She meant to write those in the file before her but she unconsciously said the words out loud as she jotted it down.
    "And It's not only nightmares, I have this headache that never goes away and...and sometimes I get paranoid over nothing. Even though all this has been happening to me for quite a long time but it just keeps getting worse." His reply made her realize that she said those words out.
     “Ok, when was the last time you seek for medical help aside from here?”
   She wrote something down on patient's folder when she got no reply and was already making a hypothesis for the disease he might be having Hassan next words took her off guard.
   “I think the Jinn is back, I can feel it, he is the one causing all these.”
        This new information surprised her and got things more complicated for her. She tried to maintain her cool stance and be professional as much as she could,
  “You might be having a psychological imbalance, it’s not something unheard of and it’s definitely something that can be cured only if you are willing to accept therapy."
"ok."
   “I will prescribe some drugs that will help you deal with headaches and restlessness.”
“ok.”
“But the therapy will be mainly talk sessions and that is the important part because healing completely lies there.”
“Ok.”
***
What was troubling her about Hassan’s case was how she will separate the spiritual being that he believes was the cause of the problems from him, but she couldn’t do that when she herself did not have enough clarity about what the Jinn world. 
  Although, she didn't entirely belief that Jinns weren't real neither was she going to deny that some unseen supernatural being existed, but for Jinns to possess humans and being able to have influence their behavior and health is what she considered as those tales that gullible adults narrate to make people unnecessarily scared.
          She attempted to compare what Islam says about Jinn possession with logic but her limited knowledge about Islam drew her back. The only thing she knows Islam mentioned about supernatural beings were Angels.
   She closed the book and took her phone, Hassan’s case would be harder than she thought.