This is a narrative essay that i’m going to hand in for english class. You can critique it if you like, though i doubt I’ll make any other changes. Tell me your thoughts :\
The next few pages merely touch upon an incident that I was unfortunate enough to have experienced a few months ago. I will speak of it as best as I can, though I must say I wasn’t truly myself in the first week or so. That can be attributed to hunger or dehydration. Or the delirious cloud I rode on when my mother checked me into the Cobequid Multi-service Centre, five minutes away from my house. I was very grateful for that distance. If my condition worsened, it would have saved me. Which brings me to something that I can honestly say to many people whom will not understand until they have been hit with a pain that threatens their very sanity.
When you are at your all-time prime of contentment in your life, you will not have any indication nor gut feeling, telling you that you are about to go on a wild roller coaster ride consisting of every spectrum of emotion that will leave you overwhelmed and shaken; everything you knew and felt up until that point becomes utterly obsolete.
I wrap my arms around my stomach and settle myself onto the nearest couch. I have not eaten much the past two days. It was on Friday that I started feeling dull cramps inside of my body. By Saturday I had staggered, quite literally, to the bathroom ten times.
Yesterday, I hardly ate. I was up until the quiet hours of the morning, repeating the same amount of bathroom runs I had completed the night before. For 48 hours I had lived with an alien feeling inside of my abdomen. It was bothering me, needless to say.
It is now Sunday morning. I look sickeningly from my clenched stomach to the muffin wrappings and crumbs of sliced bread on my desk. I had awoke, an hour before, with a ravenous craving of solid food, that I readily consumed.
“It hurts,” I say to myself. I am distinctly aware of the animalistic noises emanating from my quivering lips. I am growling, groaning in pain.
I become scared.
I punch in my mother’s cell phone number. I know that I have crossed the line from being ill to being endangered. My mom’s voice confirms this. I hear her telling me that she is coming home from work to take me to the doctor. I hang up.
My body is slouched over now. I can feel my make-shift breakfast wrecking hell in my stomach.
“It was a mistake,” I whisper. I think to myself that I am talking out loud. My voice isn’t comforting, but I have little time to think about that for a strong, liquefied feeling of nausea descends throughout my body like a transcending curtain. I can hear myself whimpering and my breath is coming in short, quick gasps as I debate whether to hold this plague down or to rid myself of it.
I am in the bathroom, on my knees, hunched over and trembling when my mom finds me. I wipe my mouth and tell her to take me away from here. She does, and I soon find myself at the mercy of my family doctor. My body shakes under his touch when he examines my stomach for the cause of my misery.
“It’s not appendicitis,” He states, and I hold in my need to cry. “It will pass in a few days. Probably just a stomach virus,”
“Does that mean I don’t have any painkillers?” I want to say, but I am exhausted. I don’t want to pull myself up just so I can drive back home and return to the source of my discomfort.
The pain is gradually flaring up and I have lost the ability to walk straight. Instead, I stand leaning to one side, and my mother tells me how pale I am. I want to tell her how tired I am but the sharp ache in my side prevents me from speaking.
At home I drift between disturbed sleep and excruciating, sharpened reality. I try to sleep but I am in so much pain that I can’t even make myself move. I lay there and pray for some relief, instead of this all-knowing, disoriented dimension that I am trapped in. Conscious of every second, and every sharp intake of breath.
I lay there and I contemplate dying. Anything, to escape this literal, agonizing thorn in my side. It has been 4 hours in this prison, so far.
An hour later I find myself clawing at the rocks in my driveway, on all fours, as my stomach heaves up its non existent contents. I’m spewing up stomach acid now. I have to go to emergency. I want to be sent to emergency.
They admit me immediately as administration and awaiting patients set their eyes on me. I am leaning on my mother, my face downcast in a tight knot of pain. I am aware of the nurse asking me questions, and of the distant pain in my upper left arm as my blood pressure is taken.
“Take this,” The nurse says, handing me a cup.
I am ready to shake my head, but I’ll do anything for some relief. “What do I do with this?” I ask, dumbfounded, but I knew the answer anyways.
When I am done with that I limp down to a designated area where I am given a bed. My body screams as I lay in what I hope is to be my final resting place of the day. My mother is crying and it upsets me. I can’t even will my body to tremble anymore because my world revolves around what is inside me. Pain is my world. It’s been my world for nearly 6 hours. Pain is all that I know of now.
They make me undress. I lay back on a plain white pillow, clothed by a thin cotton material that presses too close to my body. I am wrapped with three warm blankets and I am ready to leave this reality for today.
“What is wrong with her?!” My mother demands over and over again as blood is sucked out of my arm. I hardly react, but it hurts. I grit my teeth, but it is nothing to this flaming blade wedged into my side. My blood pressure is taken again and I want to scream at them to stop, but all I can do is smile and wish they’d hurry on with my relief.
First comes the IV. It is administered three times because I am too dehydrated to give a normal vein for this task. When it is finally in, I feel weakness for the first time. I feel small, watching the daily activities of the emergency centre swarm around me.
“Is this what you see everyday?” I want to ask them, but I can’t.
“She doesn’t look that sick,” I hear the doctor say and I want to respond. “But she has to stay,” Something along those lines, anyways. I was fading fast.
“You’re so nice,” My eyes say, as my lids try to close over them. The nurse is smiling down at me, a syringe in hand, gently pumping morphine into my veins. This is the good part, I tell myself. The ceiling is moving above me and I try to follow it, but I get lost in sleep.
I can make out bits and pieces as I lay there. I am not really laying there, I am omniscient. I can hear all. I sleep, yet I hear all.
“We got it. It’s acute pancreatis,” The doctor says. His voice is too loud. I am swaying as I hear murmuring voices around me and it’s distracting. I want to tell him to stay quiet, but I cannot open my mouth.
“We can’t determine the cause. It could be attributed to many things,” More words, from the doctor. I remember vaguely thinking he was cute, when I was conscious and I suppress an insane urge to giggle.
When I am awake much later I sleepily climb into a wheelchair and I am pushed down the corridor for x-rays. I can barely stand, but I am aware that my stomach is merely tender, and not sore. The morphine was still present in my body. I was covered in sticky devices from an EKG that was administered upon me when I was out of it.
That night, I am driven home, but I suppose I should be in a hospital. My mother argued against it, wanting to keep me safe at home. I try to contact a loved one, and tell him what I had experienced in the last 24 hours. I crawl into my bed and drift off into a blissful sleep. I am without pain. I am free, I am light.
I am not to eat for 4 days. I am to have more scheduled tests, more blood drawn. I begin to feel like a goddess; a goddess of pain. I come into contact with invulnerability. I have breached the gates of hell and I have returned. I think of this every night for the next three weeks.
“What the hell happened to you Ashley?” My loved one asks me. He is terrified. He is away from me, many miles away from me, but I hear his voice on the phone. A week later, he has finally reached me, due to lack of communication means before. I struggle to explain. I have not yet recovered, 6 days later. I still cannot walk upright by myself, nor am I without hunger or pain all the time, though most of it has left my weak body. But I find solitude in his voice and I can feel myself healing as we talk.
“Some kind of a virus,” I found myself saying. I didn’t know how to explain. “the doctor says it went through my stomach…and settled into my pancreas. My mother thought it was cancer,” I say this solemnly, quietly. But six days have already past and I am losing the memory of the raw, absolute pain that I lived through for nearly 12 hours of my life. I can afford to smile as I begin to explain. And my verbal account, to explain just what had tipped my view of the world upside down, started something like this:
I wrap my arms around my stomach and settle myself onto the nearest couch. I have not eaten much the past two days…