Chapter 218: Girl V wall

We heard the knocking and banging from up the stairs before we were even half way up and instinctively we both knew where it was coming from, we had left her to long in while we tried to sort herself out and as we all expected she was now in trouble.

 “Oh crap,” I muttered to Emmet before picking up the pace and taking the rest of the stairs at a run and sprinting up the corridor towards dream where the disturbance was.

 For the want of a better world Mi had gone crazy as I almost expected but because there was a lack of anything obvious to use as a cutting weapon and her brain had been too frenzied to even try and think of one she had taken it upon herself to take on the walls of her room with a battering ram; the battering ram in question being herself.

 Normally there wouldn’t have been many ways to take on this situation apart from deliberate with whoever was helping you; quick, and then take whoever it was to the floor, however myself and Emmet needed no time to deliberate with each other, one look explained exactly what we were going to do and we both new taking her to the floor was a bad idea. She was already terrified that either Emmet or I was going to demand something unspeakable of her because we gave her the medication that she needed to breath and both of us swiping her feet from under her then proceeding to bundle on her back was not going to help her emotional distress at all.

 “Mi, I shouted taking off to the right off the room while Emmet took off to the left, “Mi stop it!” I winced as she threw her whole body off of one of the walls with a hideous crack.

“No, why should I?” She shouted almost angrily again like she had been with us in the clinic room but her anger was fully turned onto herself now she hated her mind and she hated her body for how it made her feel and she wanted to punish it, she wanted to make it hurt like it had made her hurt. She knew that it was a vicious cercal but she also knew she had to try.

 “Because you are going to hurt you’re self and if that isn’t a reason enough then another one is if you don’t stop we will restrain you!”  I yelled readying myself for a restraint that I didn’t want to perform at the same time as Emmet did are bodies moving in the same fluid moment in perfect time with each other, regret for the actions we were about to preform making us slightly heavier in our movements.

 “I don’t fucking care, I’ve been restrained so much now It doesn’t bother me but if I’m going down I’m not going there without a fight.” Mi yelled and with one last bout of effort she throw her fist into a wall with everything she had put behind it and as bone and wall collided something snapped signaling the fight was over. The wall had won.

Chapter 217: Whats a good nurse?

 

Esmee

 

“Tell me I just miss-heard what she just said. Emmet if there is anything good or right left in this bloody world tell me I heard her wrong,” I said stiffly to Emmet as I tried to get my legs to work again so I could run after Mi for whatever she had planned to do now could not be a good thing. Emmet had asked the question that I had hated my entire life and she had not answered. She had revealed horrific abuse from her past and left the room in tears. Not even the safest of people could have been considered anything other than unsafe right then. We did not need an answer to know she was facing trouble, yet I could not make my feet move right then as my mind was already shelf shocked in trying to understand what she had said.

There was one thing that I really wanted right then. I wanted what she said to be untrue, for the alternative was just too horrible to comprehend. How could anyone bargain medical care for sexual gratification and what monster would demand that of a child at all let alone a child that could have been dying? I had come to the conclusion that it must have been either a family member or someone close to the family that had hurt Mi over and over again and I had spent hours combing through all her files that I could get my hands on looking for a name of someone who might be the culprit, but though it said her mum went through sexual partners like toilet paper no name of her male friends where ever given so there was no culprit to report and even though I had wrote down every gory detail Mi had ever told Emmet or myself and told my higher ups over and over again no one seemed to care all that much about catching whoever had done it to her unless the name of the predator was told. I kept getting the same old stupid story that she was safe now and she would give names in her own time then the prosecution could begin. It wasn’t soon enough. He was out there still and his appetite for children would not have been gone.

 “Surly no one is that evil right?” Emmet stuttered back as gob-smacked as I was about what had just been said as he also tried to find the orientation to get to his feet and round up for the existent for the emergency that could have been unfolding. We were both aware that we were not meant to be personally involved but as humans every one of us would have needed to stop and take a breath at such revelations. We were not made of steel and were capable of great emotions too.

 “It’s too horrible to think of,” Emmet sighed putting his head in his hands, rubbing his eyes signaling to me that this had got to him more them most things did. We had all heard are fair share of confessions some of the young people on our books had been beaten, some neglected, some emotionally battered and others molested and raped but Mi’s story was haunting because even though she had revealed something that on its own was horrific behind her eyes you could see there was more that she still hid. That the story that made us real was actually not even a scratch on the surface.

 “She has never had anyone treat her how they should. How do we even start to turn around sixteen years of almost no parental guidance or protection and every kind of abuse that there is out there? I just want to protect her. I am coming up with nothing any more though but I am not sure I am prepared to just let her slip away completely either. There is something there in her, something about her that is hard not to notice. Like under all the mental issues and abuse she could change the world, or at least ours. I suppose that makes me too attached."

 “I sometimes feel I am a little bit too attached to her though Emmet. She makes me feel a bit different, like maybe I should back away move some care loads around and defiantly stand down as one of her key nursing team. If I was being a good “nurse” I would and by the sounds of it so would you.” The only problem was, was i knew i wouldn't voluntarily do what i thought i should. I couldn't

 “I think to be a good nurse though Esmee you have to know when to become a bad one and even when to risk certain things in order to give a patient what they need to survive. In cases like Mi’s and most others to be honest some of the rules would kill us. Maybe we have to just bend a few more when it comes to Mi. Maybe with her we need a certain amount of attachment to her as a person," Emmet ponded aloud trying to find a reasion to out not very logical ideas.

“I don’t have any answers but I believe that if I was going to switch off on her care I would have done it by now but to be honest all I really want to do is go and stop her from hurting herself too badly. If she has knocked us off of our feet she must have blown her world to pieces,” I moaned to myself and with one big bout of concentration I managed to get my brain to shift into gear again and I moved off of the bench holding out my hand to Emmet which he took and moved from the bench too planting a soft kiss on my lips before he extended to his full size and breathed out heavily in a sigh.

I felt his pain as well somewhere inside of me, our jobs could be cruel and times to the feelings of the nurses as well as the clients and even though we were trained to block it out so we wouldn’t burn out at the end of the day no amount of training could turn us into robots and the day to day workings of a high dependency unit could get to anyone.

 “What’s the betting that we ate going to need some gloves?” Emmet asked as he reached the door of the room and looked up at the display of medical gloves that were arranged by size.

 “You better give me a pair too,” I nodded as Emmet attached a pair of large ones to his hands then handed me over a small pair. It seemed inevitable that they were going to be needed even though she had only been left for a few minutes. Were there was the will to harm there was always a way.

 

Chapter 216: The truth isn't "nice"

My tears gave up at roughly the same time the nebulizer did. Leaving me somewhere in the middle of nothing. Physically at least I felt better and the oxygen saturation in my blood was happily plodding along between the numbers 98 and 99  but in some way through everything was admittedly less foggy, inside - were the feelings really mattered, I was raw.

 Without talking to me Esmee leant over me and pressed the end of her statoscope to my back and listened intently while I took the deep breaths that she would need to listen if there were any crackles or squeaks left in there. She wouldn’t find anything there now. My lungs felt fine and as I expected after a few minutes she put the statoscope back away and turned her attention to me. She had dealt with the outside now but as always the inside remained a problem and she was willing to have a crack at that too if she could squeeze through the barriers that I would subconsciously block her way with. Most people turned around when they saw a dead end street. Esmee and Emmet were the kind of people that would spend hours looking for a hole in the fence to crawl though.

 “So, there is a problem with nebulizers then. A problem that goes beyond the normal I don’t deserve the air problem I would think by your reaction, a problem that maybe causes flashbacks and some rather frightening ones at that. Am I getting close?”

 “I just don’t like them OK!” I snapped the anger rising in a blown to take over the empty bit that had been inside of me. “Not everything needs a story or a flash back. Sometime people just don’t like something and you shouldn’t force them to have it strapped to their face! In fact I think I might complain about you both!” I had no idea what I was saying or why I was saying it really. It felt like the words came out before I could actually think them. Anger made me different altogether, anger made me wish for death.

 "If you believe that we have done wrong by you in some way you have a perfect right to complain. If you would like I can also show you the piece of paper that allows us to do exactly what we have just done too. You have the perfect right to be angry with us if that is the way that you feel Mi and as I would with everyone I would encourage you to work with those feelings. “

 I couldn’t stay angry with her.  Even if I hated her I just couldn’t she tamed the anger and turned it into something a little different. It wasn’t sadness as such but it wasn’t happy either. Fear was there but it was a spate bubbling sensation.  It was mostly something raw that was brought on by understanding. No one else ever had and there was no reason why she should care.

 "I’m not angry at you, I’m angry at this, I’m angry at everything. Some things just won’t ever go away and they eat at the corners of my head.

 “You can tell us Mi, whatever it is you are safe now, no one is going to hurt you here.”  Emmet spoke this time his voice solid and steady as he changed his position on the bench and once again took my pulse with is two fingers. I noticed that Emmet and Esmee did it a lot like the hammering of my pulsing blood against their fingers in some way comforted them. It reminded them that I wasn’t dead. It reminded me that I was still alive and that the man who I had come to trust could be my most frightening threat in the entire world.

 “I was eleven the last time I used a nebulizer. I tried the rescue inhaler but it just didn’t work and I was scared so I tried to do what I thought I should have done and call an ambulance. I didn’t want to waste their time as I know they were busy and of course now I never would but I was eleven. Young and stupid.”

 “Sounds more like young and cleaver if you ask me. If you can’t breathe you call an ambulance it’s a logic that most of us follow in life even if it is a little sad that an eleven year old would have to do this for herself. You did the right thing back there and there is absolutely no one in the medical profession that would dispute that.” Emmet said firmly moving his self so he could get into my line of vision. It was sad, he had thought that it was the whole story and a bit of me told me to stop there. People generally preferred the lies then a painful truth and he had already bore the brunt of what happened in the park.

 “If that’s where you want the story to end it can.”  It could for them at least there didn’t have to be a brain in their lives, for them I could make him go away with no trouble at all. “The rest of the story isn’t nice.”

 ”You can tell us anything you need to or anything you want to Mi regardless if it is “nice” or not and I thing that if it is going to help you or it is something we can start to help you with you should tell us. We want to help you Mi and the more facts we have the better, Esmee said.”

 “I didn’t get to call for the ambulance. Someone found me instead and instead of helping he stole my mobile phone, pushed me to my knees, pulled down his trousers shoving his penis in my face and demanded oral sex of me if I wanted the luxury of breathing. Being eleven I was scared of dying of course so I sucked him off while he rang for an ambulance. I lived but I wished I had died and every day from then on I had wished that I had died and right now I wish I was dead too."

Panic took me at this point the words had been calm up to then like I had been explaining about another person’s nightmare and not my own but now I could feel his hands on me again and the walls closing in around me and I had to escape from them and everything else before I suffocated  or screamed.

 “Can I go now?” I asked almost desperately as I got to my wobbling legs. “My chest is fine and you know to much so I am going ok. I said stumbling towards the clinic door.

 “Mi are you safe?”

 I didn’t answer, they already knew.

Chapter 215 ; Poison and cure

 “Mi, I have no more time to waste with this. I am here for you and have got all afternoon free to sit and talk with you if you need it but right now I have to give you this nebulizer. It will take about twenty minutes to go through. If things are back to normal I will check your pulse, have a quick listen to your chest - If I can find a damn statoscope and if all is good you can be on your way. So are you going to sit down for me so I can give this to you?”

 I burst into tears as Esmee finished her speech. She was bot being mean; she never was. She was being matter of fact and stern but I knew as well as anyone sometimes people needed that.  A kick up the bum in the right direction would often get your there quicker than gentle encouragement but it could leave you feeling confused and raw too and right now I couldn’t breathe for the tears.

 “Come on, it’s Ok,” Esmee said gently now, her voice laced with honey again. She had been expecting me to kick off apparently but my tears had made her confused. I could not stop them no matter how much I tried. “Sit down here with Emmet and it will all be over before you know it.”

 I lasted about four and a half minutes of having the mask over my face pushing the medication around and into my lungs. It felt like with every breath I was inhaling poison right into the very pit of me, like the mist that was slowly saving my lungs was killing me in the proses. It was stupid but I was convinced that when I left the clinic room, when I went to sleep the monsters would be there to collect the soul I had promised them by granting myself the medication to breath.  Brian had wanted a “blow job” for the pleasure of breathing. I had given it to him and lived; afterwards I could only wish that I had died. The way it felt, smelt, even tasted could invade my senses and chock me whenever it wanted to. I jumped and half screamed clawing the mask off of my face before coughing harshly as I tried to retreat again. When I got out of the door I would not stop running this time not until the very last of my consciousness was zapped from me.

 “No no no, no you don’t, we’re not quite done yet, a few more minutes and it’s all done but right now you need to sit here.” Emmet reacted fast before I could move coupling his words with the restraint that I knew had always been on the cards while Esmee leant in and reattached the biting green elastic back over my face. I tried once or twice to twist myself out of his grips but I had come to know that there was something about the staff’s restraints that could lock you in and Emmet because of his brute size was particularly good at it. I was locked in and my lungs celebrated as the spasm began to release and the oxygen filled up the gaps that had been closed off. It was my head that screamed though and it let the demons in through the doors I had welded shut. I had no fight in me and the tears didn’t work to change what had happened. A nebulizer was so simple to most while it spread fear in me. It would save my life in the end but that only served to make me hate it more.  I welcomed death. I fought for it.

 “I am sorry this is so hard Mi,” Esmee said trying to use her words to sooth me over the hissing of the machine that spread cure and poison through my body at the same time, “We don’t do these things to be mean. We make these choices because we believe it to be the right ones. We will only override your wishes when we believe that your illness is clouding your judgment.” Her words sounded good and even acceptable in some ways and that was why nurses around the world were making decisions like this one. Sections and holds were going through as we spoke because it was believed that illnesses were taking over people and making them irrational but the fact was how did they really know?  Maybe it wasn’t an illness that made a person go after death, maybe it was an understanding. Surly sometimes giving up was not just easy. It was also right.

 I let the tears fall without bothering to try and hide them. They had seen them a thousand times anyway, hiding them had become something I wasn’t that good at any more. That time had gone. I had lost all hope at ambivalence and numbness from the day that Emmet had sat down on the side of my bed and held out a hand to me.

 “It’s just the same stuff that is given in your inhalers Mi just in a bigger dose and in an easy way. It just means you haven’t got to worry about trying to hold your breath and things you can just breathe normally and try to relax a little bit” It worked in theory, for people that where not me, for the undamaged normal ones that functioned normally in a world that didn’t have nurses living just down the hall from them or cuts made with Razors kissing the backs of their wrist. It worked for them however for me it was not designed to, nothing ever did. I did not fit right in the world where everyone else did. From Nebulizers to personality I wasn’t just a cercal trying to fit through a square hole. My shape wasn’t even on the shape sorter.

Chapter 214 : Control – Damned if you have it, damned if you don’t

“I don’t do nebulizers.” I protested firmly as Emmet squeezed the medicine into the pot on the nebulizer and attached the tubes to the machine placing it onto a work station next to me.  He ignored my protest still not aware at how serious I was and tried to pull the green elastic of the mask over the back of my head.

 My head boiled over and my body snapped and before I could even stop myself or get my brain to digest what I was asking of it I jumped off of the doctors bench squeezed my body passed Emmet’s ducked Esmee’s feeble attempt to stop me and retreated into the corridor before discovering I could go no further even if I wanted to. My lungs dragged my body down into a swirling vortex onto the ground were I sat gasping feebly at the air around me. 

 “Well that got you far didn’t it,” Emmet commented almost harshly as he came out of the clinic room and stood over my body with his hands on his hips. I could suddenly feel what an ant must have when faced with a human child and its ant hill. Emmet was scary when he wanted to be. So scary I wanted to scream or beg or shout at him but the noise was lost inside me. “Come on get back in here now,” He demanded holding the door of the clinic room open with one hand and gesturing with his head.

 “Oh stop being so grizzly, not everyone knows you as well as I do and I am assuming to them your shear mass could be intimidating. I know you are a teddy bear but still simmer down will you,” Esmee groaned rolling her eyes in a way Crystal would be proud of before she squatted down in front of me and hocked the hair that was in my face over my shoulder before reattaching the clip to my finger.

 “We have a duty of care towards you honey. Now this number here shows the saturation of oxygen in your blood,” Esmee said pointing at the red number at the top of the hand held device.  “Normally this is between nighty five and one hundred and that’s when we guys are happy. When it gets below that we are going to want to be giving you oxygen and when it gets below 90 we should calling an ambulance to get you over the hospital ASAP  because you are in real danger. Your saturation in at 88% and you have an audible wheeze on your chest and just by looking at you I can see all these mussels  in your neck and chest working extra hard to inflate and deflate your lungs. We need to give you some medication to make easier for you. So how about we get you back into the clinic room and sorted out.”

 My mind pulled in two different directions Logic and raw emotion. I was not stupid I knew how the end looked in this situation. Esmee had syringed black hell into my mouth even when it hurt her. To save my life she reacted and here she would do it again if it was needed. Emmet would restrain me locking my arms around my back and Esmee would attach the mask to my face and push the button.  It was horrifying to me but maybe secretly that is what I wanted - The choice to be taken out of my hands. If it happened that way I was not selling my soul, it was being forcibly taken from me and they were stronger than me so I couldn’t fight them off. I was the victim either way. There was no way I could be accountable for my decision. There was a part of me though that wanted to stand up and scream  no at them, that it was my choice in the world to receive treatment and they couldn’t make me. There was a part of me that just wanted to breathe.  All of me just hurt from my very core.

 “Come on, up you get, back inside Mi, we are out of time.” Esmee grabbed one of my arms and Emmet grabbed the other pulling me to my feet and helping me back into the room. Emmet let go of me first and hopped up onto the bench in a kneeling position. The place between his legs would be the area where my body would land up being in seconds weather I liked it or not. I had the choice weather his arms comforted or restrained. For once it was in my control but I wasn’t really sure I wanted it. I was lost.

Chapter 213: Life's price

My lungs rattled in my rib cage like some random Halloween decoration as I forced another raspy squeaking breath out of my lungs the world around me swimming more as I breathed in trying desperately to force the air into my tiny air ways that where now no bigger than the straw on a cartoon of juice that you would give to a child.

 “Please … Brian.” I begged hardly able to force the words out from my chest without falling completely into the swirling black that gathered in the front of my eyes. “Please Brian …… Let me…call… 9...99.” I gasped feebly trying to grab at my mobile phone he hanged just over my head out of my reach like he was torturing a puppy with a biscuit and like most puppy’s I was far to loyal or far too stupid to use the razor sharp teeth I was given and wrap them around his ankles or in my case kick him in the balls.

 “Bri…I’m… gonna die.” I tried to shout but it came out as nothing more as a crackling rasping sound from somewhere at the base of my struggling lungs I knew they were slowly giving up from inside me and the next stage was stopping breathing altogether, even if he did give in now there was a chance that the paramedics that carried the nebulizer and oxygen that I so desperately needed would come too late to save my life but the worse thing was he just didn’t care. If I died it would be a shame but to him it would have been no worse than breaking a favorite toy; he could always go and find another one to play with in the end.

 “Show me that you love me. Show me how much you want it Mia.” Brian cooed slivering his body up close to mine as he pulled down his jeans and boxers. Of course this is what he wanted; that was all he ever wanted. Sexual gratification that he could only ever really get from someone he shouldn’t have. I thought I had been saved after Joe decided to leave my mum to hunt for new pray but Brian like to play too he might as well have used me as his toy.  

 “I will.” I cried the tears pouring down over my face as the pain that gripped in my lungs intensified and my breathing become even shallower. It felt like I was drowning without water, like the surface was miles away but you needed the air then. Like you would sell your soul for one tiny gasp of oxygen to inflate and deflate your lungs and that was what I was going to have to do. Sell my soul by pretending I wanted to have sex with him. Pretending like I was enjoying myself.

 

“I will do whatever you want,” I chocked out through my lungs as I got down to my knees and took his erect penis into my hands. The tears still rolling out of my eyes that now had black spots over them. I was either going to die from the lack of oxygen or live only to want to die from what I was going to have to do.

 “ Suck it if you want to suck air bitch,” Brian shouted thrusting his  groin into my face and obediently I opened my mouth as he dialed the three numbers into my phone. I was 11 years old and I had to give my new supposed father oral sex to have the privilege of breathing, and I knew it cost too much and I vowed that I would never use a nebulizer again. Ever.

(in hindsight I should have vowed to bite it off.)

Chapter 212: To make The pawns protest

 

The clinic room broke me; or broke my lungs anyway. This room always had a funny smell and today it was stronger like everything had just been cleaned with bleach and ammonia. My lungs squeezed together fully and for a few terrifying seconds I was almost certain that I would stop breathing altogether. I coughed hard trying to shift some air around and grabbed hold of the doctor’s bench to try and steady myself. my lungs squeaking furiously in their annoyance.

 

“Ok sweetie, try not to panic, take some deep breaths if you can and I will get your inhaler for you.” Esmee flew past me to the cupboards of medicine and turned her key in the lock pulling out the tray that had my name printed on the front of it, obscuring most of the history underneath. I could make out the name Adam-James Hayden written on the label just under my name. I wondered who would be at the very bottom. History covered with sticky tape, names since forgotten.

 

Esmee shook a blue inhaler and released two doses into the air before handing it over to me to use which I tried to do without much success. It took coordination and some lung capacity to successfully use an inhaler and I had lost most of mine by then. My coordination was focused on not letting the black dots that exploded over my vision take me under or allowing my spiraling head to pull me off of the bench and onto the floor underneath. My ears buzzed as the sounds began to echo around me apart from the thudding of my heart. The oximeater Esmee had attached to one of my fingers beeped in protest as I tried to draw more of the medicine into my lungs without much success.

 

“Sorry about that my dears I had my hands full back then.” Emmet announced cheerfully as he allowed himself into the clinic room a few seconds later rubbing alcohol rub into his hands and attaching new gloves from the display of boxes just inside the door. The smell of the alcohol rub made my lungs screech out in another protest and my breathing to accelerate. Esmee winced slightly silencing the alarm on the hand held monitor. She had not taken one eye off of the decreasing numbers anyway, there was no need for any audio prop to signal my body’s distress.

 

“Well that sounds really nasty and uncomfortable my love,” Emmet confirmed for me pressing two fingers to the back of my wrist as he followed the second hand, “and your heart is really pissed about it as well,” he confirmed.

 

“we are having trouble getting the salbutamol inhalers to stick,” Esmee said nodding with a grimace “We got O2 SATS of 89 to 90 and a pulse of 105ish; ambulance? She suggested.

 

“I’m hoping it won’t come to that. I think we should try a nebulizer first. It will make it a little bit easier to take the salbutamol in without having to hold your breath and things. We can give the maximum dose that way as well.”

 

“No!” I shouted, not caring how much it hurt to talk or how my lungs protested to the added effort put on them. I sat quietly though everything they normally gave me. I let pills of every color of the rainbow tumble down my throat every morning and every night because a nurse popped them into a cardboard cup and presented them to me with water. They all came with the promise of course that they would go towards making me better. They were meant to drive the pain away, trick my head into thinking that it was happy while others were meant to rebuild my physical body. They couldn’t manage it completely but they did give the crumbling pillars that supported me a first aid kit of super glue and sticky tape to play with. I didn’t mind them giving me them if they wanted to play with my life. They didn’t hurt, not really, and everyone needed a super living doll, however nebulizers were different, they changed the rules. They changed the rules so much that even pawns and dolls had to protest.

 

“Honey if you can’t get the asthma under control with the inhaler the nebulizer is the next step. If we call an ambulance they are going to do exactly the same thing OK? I thought you would be used to this with your history of asthma,” Emmet smiled as he went over to the cupboard and to my horror started pulling out the things that he would need to start the treatment. The panic rose higher inside me. He hadn’t understood how serious I had been. I could not – would not – use a nebulizer. Too much had passed connected with it. I had promised never again. It was not about life and death even though that was the consequence it could hold. It was about staying sane enough to want to live.

Chapter 211: Progress is funny

"We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.”

C.S. Lewis

 

Edward swiped his key card in the door and it opened with a long drawn out beep alerting anyone inside that someone had arrived.  This time it had just happened to be me coming back in. Apparently I was coming home but that suggested that it should have been a good thing. That my mother would have made a spot up on the sofa with a blanket and a cup of tea and she would look after me just glad that I was alive. I doubt my mother even knew what had happened. When I first moved into Annie and Paul’s about six months previously they had had a plan all set up for my mother to see me but she only ever managed to see me twice before she gave up. She told Social services that she was too upset to see her last remaining daughter trying to hurt herself so she would not come again. Social services gave her a hand to hold a shoulder to cry on and the reassurance that her reaction was reasonable and that my behavior was not her fault but because I was “very sick.”  I had not seen her since or even had a phone call. She could have been dead. I could have been dead and she didn’t care. The fact that she still circled around inside my head suggested that I still cared for her more than I should have. Just under four months in the care of apple gate wouldn’t make it home. I had never had one, not really, so why would I start now.

 

I had been away for nearly three weeks. It had started with low blood sugar and a drip to boast it after I had refused to eat or drink anything and Emmet had followed through on a promise to make me no matter what Sophie had said. It turned into two operations, slit wrist, cut boobs, a life threatening overdose, an even more life threatening infection, rape a disclosure and at the very end of it all the tiniest slice of hope. I had no idea where it could come from out of all the rubbish and hate or how something so simple had turned into such carnage but maybe in its way it had to do that because even though those bad things happened I had also taken a step in the right direction.  Emmet new now, not everything but enough so I was no longer completely alone, after sixteen years there was someone else on the sideline who knew that games I had been playing against my will. I had made a stride backwards yet a baby step forward leaving me wondering if I had in fact fallen deeper into the bottomless hole or found a foot hold. Was it even possible to fall and rise at the same time.

     

I suppose you’re going to go and lock me in the ECA now.” I moaned trying to ignore the rattling that had signaled his arrival in my lugs, l had lived my whole life with asthma and it flared up from time to time without and warning. It was probably the heat and the stale air that made them react now. Or maybe it wasn’t even the asthma maybe it was because I was once again stuck inside walls that I didn’t want to be a part of maybe it was because Doctor Jordan promised me that apple gate house would help. That within six weeks he could at least know why I was like I was but I had been here around sixteen and all he had done so far was stick a tube up my nose and some tablets down my throat. Maybe it wasn’t the asthma but the panic that made my lungs squeeze.

 

“Are you feeling unsafe honey?” Edward asked concerned about my question about the ECA. Had he thought I had been asking to be put in there? I hadn’t been. Out of anywhere I had ever been few rooms had ever seemed or felt as bad as the ECA, and I had been locked in rooms before.  I had had unthinkable things happen to me in the corners of a box room but at least they had never claimed that they were safe. The ECA promised something that It could only ever really provide in the physical world. The monsters inside you could still rape your mind as the cameras watched on. 

 

“No, no! I am fine!” I assured him coughing twice to try and get rid of the blockage that hurt my lungs. It was defiantly asthma. The fresh new Lilly’s that I had only just noticed sitting on the waiting area table along with the outdated magazines had been what triggered it. I had always been allergic to lilies however I had forgot to mention it when they had asked me about allergies. It seemed unimportant, until now

 

“I can sit with you for a bit honey I’m not doing anything. I can get a head nurse to asses you as well if you want.”

 

“Who am I assessing?”  Emmet asked smiling as his giant sized feet thudded down over the stairs carrying a yellow hazard bag in one hand and sharps can in the other, and beside him Esmee shadowed in his footsteps holding  the hand of a girl shadowed. She had red eyes and was pale in the face with dyed red hair. She wore a black skirt with stripped tights and a black vest top. A black solid lace arm warmer snaked up her left arm to the shoulder and on the right bracelets covered her wrist and most of her fore arm in florescent colors. Apparently the right clothing and dyed hair wasn’t enough to endure a room search. We all broke underneath as yellow bags carried away everything we had and thought we needed.   

 

“I just got back with Mi. She mentioned maybe not feeling so hot and needing some safety measures put in place."
Did I also mention the fact that I had said nothing of the sort and was just asking a question and the Edward may have just been making mountains out of mole hills?

 

“Ok I can do that I just need to go and put this in the bin, book a few things in and write some notes before I forget,” Emmet said coming over and stopping by my side before he heard what I was hoping he wouldn’t have.

 

“Esmee seems I got my hands full can you take Mi to the clinic room and take Mi’s SATS and peek flow for me, I Will come and take over as soon as I can.”

 

“Yeah sure I can. You’ve met Edward haven’t you Ellie. Do you mind just spending a bit of time with him while I sort out Mi out? I will try to come back and check on you as soon as I can OK.” It wasn’t like she would have had a choice really anyway. It wasn’t Esmee’s fault of course but it was very easy to feel like you were being passed around like furniture in here however if Ellie felt that way she didn’t show it or she had felt it so often she didn’t care anymore. She shrugged it off and made her way into the day room. Edward followed her.

 

“Oh you do sound healthy,” Esmee commented sarcastically. “Let’s get you down to the clinic room.”