Trapped in a deadened slumber, my body sinks into the bed. I am awake but my brain is only dimly aware of the world, far away, muffled through a lens and filter of the sleep only those who've gone days without it understand. My heart is suddenly galloping, a terrified thoroughbred, mane trailing, tail horizontal, clip clopping manically through my arteries causing anxiety to follow in its hoofbeats. My heart is trying to escape a throbbing bass reverberating up my throat.
Adrenaline is flooding my system in a desperate push to move me to act in response to the poison it's sounding the alarm for. The smell of chemicals burn my nasal passages, grip my neck, my throat muscles clench in and out touching each other in painful escalating speed. My chest aches and asthma is a medieval corset. It squeezes my lungs. Instinctively my breathing shallows and the exhale whistles in a thready gasp.
My brain lets rip a muted roar for oxygen. Words are beyond my capability. I mime uselessly at Ma gathering all my strength to wildly eyeball my nebuliser, my hand a dying fish on its last pointless flop against my chest as life giving oxygen drains from me.
We suck at charades or rather Ma does. Yesterday while paralysed having stopped breathing, tears leaked out of my eyes, my body's distress streaming rivulets down my face as I tried desperately to get her to notice my unmoving chest. My muscles remained stubbornly fixed my eyes unblinking. I had been here before, paralysed, not breathing but some part of me had known to preemptively put oxygen on... this time I was not so fast. Even then the nurses called a code and started resuscitation as my lips turned blue. Screaming, "Come back Amara, come back." I was right there but helpless in my silent bubble. Locked in.
Have you tasted the poison of chronic infection? It drips steadily down your burning, aching throat, throbs and leaks in your ears. That is what's happening except I can also feel my cells ablaze with stuttering inefficiency.
A galaxy of cells sputtering and choking on tendrils of infection. Webs of bugs catching cells and causing my immune system to misfire.
The fighting cells, warrior cells are weakening my body in their battle to thwart these infections and viruses. Draining my energy dramatically like a car with a battery that goes dead suddenly.
My body is desperate for the poisoned Snow White slumber to recharge and build the energy necessary to untangle my immune system warrior cells from their battle. It is a crash episode one that echoes my earliest days of 18hours of sleep daily and 6hours of zombie. Stacked on top are neurological symptoms twisting my body into contortionist dance coordinated by a wicked marionettist formed from the bugs that riddle my brain and bones, a hive mind demanding my body seize, convulse, freeze me in paralysis and cease my breathing.
I am not destined to be a marionette forever. One frayed cord snaps off at a time. The more determined I am, the more focussed, I find myself using my contortions to pull tension on the elaborate construction holding my body in the mad marionettist's rough hands. His beloved frame is dragged haphazardly across the sharp edges that inevitably meet my body. Each time those strings wear and fray, a fine fibre of yarn, one strand at a time discreetly snaps and I am ever closer to my escape.
