Side Effects

Echelle

Echelle couldn't decide what bothered her more- the way her joints creaked and popped as she stiffly entered the waiting room, or how silence drowned the vicinity, amplifying the percussions of her frail bones. A few heads turned her way in reaction to her body's drum solo, but she avoided eye contact and made her way over to the receptionist who wore overbearingly lively scrubs with bunny rabbits on them. The woman offered Echelle a bright smile that stretched from ear to ear and handed her a clipboard which, in consequence to attending these visits to the medical center on a frequent basis, felt very familiar.

She signed her name procedurally and took a seat next to a young girl whose cheeks glowed with ten times more color than every other being in the hospital. Her healthy presence meant she was there to accompany someone rather than to receive treatment herself. To Echelle, the multitude of patients placed rigidly in their seats resembled skeletons such as the ones she remembered seeing in her anatomy lessons in college.

Every visit to the medical center added more and more tension to Echelle's coiled up brain. It wasn't the ride to the hospital, nor the treacherous maze she had to walk to get to the E Wing of the building. It was the uncertainty in not only her own condition, but the other patients around her. She had spent three months then, attending frequent transfusion sessions in an overly- cushioned and air conditioned room with various strangers that came and went, just as her condition's side effects did. In some cases, Echelle could see the life physically drain from her fellow patients' faces; in an almost monochromatic manner, the color in some of their faces stultified after every visit, becoming more and more skeleton-like as time went on. Although she had not taken the time to get to know any of the people around her personally, she became very familiar with a few of the faces that, just as her own complexion, dulled with every return to that very room.