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.