Tubes and Nurses

Medical equipment. Tubes and harnesses. This is my life, and it will be my death. I try not to think about it most of the time, but for a while, just this little while, I will.

I have always grown up thinking I could do anything; be anyone, but now I know life is not so simple. I am Iain, a man of 22 years and I have a genetic disorder called Cystic Fibrosis. To put it in layman's terms, my mucous is thick, thicker than the average person's. It breeds infection, and causes near nonexistent digestion. I've always been skinny, I've always been coughing, and I've always been dying, little by little, faster than the average person.

Teenage years can be rough for everyone, but I always felt so alone in my plights. No-one I knew quite realized what sickness is like. There would be sympathy, but no help. Counselors didn't even know what could be done, aside from even more medication. I learned exactly how cold things were, sitting for days alone in my hospital bed after another exacerbation. I would ask and plead people to make some time. It seldom happened.

Video games and books were my only salvation. My lungs were at 50 percent capacity, so I didn't want to do much, aside from walk on the treadmill for 15 minutes or so. Stories were my escape, my serenity. Where else could I go? Tubes and pumps and harnesses...

Depression. It was always there. Stemming from my grade school days and the times of being the small one. Worthlessness and emptiness bred contempt and anger. I lashed out at the people who mattered most to me, and they became the same as I. By the 16th year of my life I was becoming a shell, a husk of better days that hid himself away in the depressive mind of his own making. Tubes and pumps were my future at this time, never my past. I had always been the good little kid who took his medicine. I stopped.

It was my downfall. I knew I had done this to myself. Caring was not something I was fond of. To me, caring meant a chance for things to just get worse. More pain. More anger. More anguish. I tried to kill myself slowly, with tubes and hospitals and nurses. I never saw a light at the end of the tunnel, so I decided to stop walking down it.

Days started melting together. The hospital was becoming my new little home. In for a month, out for two. In, out, in, out. I did not care. Then there was a discordance, a little voice in the back of my hollow, cold mind. Something was hatching. I would stand and watch the skyline out my window for hours, staring and thinking. I was walking around more. Medication was taken, treatments completed. Resistance was lessened. I took advice, and started seeing another counselor. I was put on psychoactive drugs to help speed the process along. The tunnel was being walked again.

I just want to say to all the people out there who are struggling, things get better. They always get better. Until next time.