This has little to do with my situation, except that corruption breeds more corruption. Multiplying and mutating until it infects the entire organism. It will eventually kill its
host, but the individual cancer cells do not care. They do not have minds.
Medical errors, incompetence or negligence can happen anywhere. It happened at the first two hospitals, but what the beast did to me once I was settled into its belly, bathed in digestive
fluids, was far worse. It was, one might say, a combination of avarice and incompetence.
And perhaps something else. Something I don't have a word for just now. Whatever it is, there was plenty of it there.
Maybe it is a way that some people have of not seeing other people as people. Not exactly solipsism, in the philosophical sense anyway, but in the use of the word to describe extremely
self-centered people.
The first time I was awake and cognizant long enough to assess my situation was in early March. I had been effectively comatose since 15 December of
the previous year. About 120 days. For the moment I was blissfully unaware of everything, even as I deduced from my environment that I was in
a hospital bed. Later I noticed the wires with which my wrists and ankles were tied to the bed frame, but for a few minutes I thought about nothing.
Later I would learn that I had about two dozen drugs in me. I would eventually learn that on most days five or six of them were psychotropic medications,
used for treating mentally ill people. But that was later. I lay there awaiting the inevitable arrival or a nurse or other hospital staff member.
Eventually that occurred and some conversation ensued, I don't remember much about it. I was pretty fuzzy and would remain so for some time. I
had a feeding tube in the place where feeding tubes go, and some sort of box, about the size of a phone but somewhat thicker, with lights on it and wires attaching
it to various parts of my body.
I later learned that it was a telemetry unit. Used on patients who require monitoring after a heart attack. It was almost always turned off
or unplugged from the power supply, I don't know which. None of the personnel seemed to know or care much about it. I believe a time or two someone
did something with it or some of the wires. All I knew was that I had a box hanging on a cord around my neck, along with another cord holding the feeding tube
in place. I could only sleep on my back, something I have never liked.
The next week or two were pretty much the same. In the morning a nurse would come in, check my temperature, possibly my blood pressure but I don't seem to
remember that happening very often, and put something in the feeding tube.
The next couple of weeks were hazy. I was in a dirty hospital gown in a dirty hospital bed and nurses were coming in occasionally and putting things in the feeding tube and
leaving. My hands were sometimes freed in order to allow me to sit up, usually at feeding time, and then I was again tied.
Let me take a moment to describe the manner of my restraint. Around my wrists and ankles were loops of wire, a grey wire of two strands, each perhaps two millimeters thick. This
wire was connected to a strip of cloth (resembling strips torn from bed sheets) connected the wire to the bed frame. I could not move my feet or arms more than a foot, if that.
I don't know if you can understand that feeling, bound hand and foot, completely at the mercy of your captors. It is of complete helplessness. It is not a good feeling.