The “next step” of my hospital stay began sort of like how my life began. I emerged from darkness into a bright and sterile environment with doctors wiping away my tears and cutting the cord to my sustenance. In the dark I could’ve cried all I wanted and nobody would come to wipe my tears and, well, the food was always on time. Still I barely fed myself and didn’t cry until I was brought into the light.
I was led to the scale to be weighed for the first time after days of fasting in fear, surviving only on my own fat and, evidently, the tears of those who were still comfortable with being uncomfortable. Some of them were soaked in those tears or other things, in a pool for a fetus with nowhere else to go.
I had made the choice to get better by not wanting to be like any of them any longer so I was born into the Ward faced with an impossible task. Who in here was I going to choose to be my den mother or my brother or sister to learn from in a strange new world of light and hope? If I didn’t choose properly, there was a chance I would be left with one ear to the ground like all the other orphans of the ICU, hoping to be tickled into making that choice.
After being weighed I was led down a hallway past a resounding character in a muumuu dress spinning around in circles with her arms outstretched while gleaming brightly and loudly, “ I stink, I stink, I stink.”
“That’s your mom,” the nurse said in a manner like they were giving a tour of purgatory to a person who is already in hell. I thought to myself that this twirling imposter is an overgrown baby similar to those I left back in the ICU. It’s not that I came out of the ground and chose this intrepid lady to be my mom. Come to find out she already had her real son on the Ward with us.
It is interesting that out of all the babies in the world who came out of the ground to choose their mom, not one of them did so outside of my hallucinations.
I spent a lot of time there trying to get out from under the control of others and could spend even more time trying to get back into the formative womb of the ICU, but isolation was not the answer. I needed to find independence rather than security.
If I thought previously that everybody else was crazy and I was the normal one, I would have to find some truth in that in order to continue getting better.
Francis Erich McElroy 