AN: I wrote this awhile ago, I forget where I was orginally going with it. But I figured why not post it? Review please.

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June 28, 2005

“I don’t need that. I’m not going to bleed to death.”

“It’s procedure,” the nurse tells me. She wraps it around my arm despite my protests. I flinch because it’s so tight. I prefer the needle to this. They must instruct the nurses to cut off circulation. It’s procedure.

It took one minute for the blood drawing and seventy for the doctor’s office. At first thought, sucking out a person’s blood should take longer. All the doctor does is stare at you, ask you what medicine you’re taking, stare at you, poke at you, stare at you, give you a prescription slip and say goodbye. It’s all very simple and very repeatable. Blood drawing includes needles. Automatically more difficult.

The second she takes her hands off of me, I’m out of the chair and out of the room. I walk out of the office and into the parking lot, ripping the red binding from my arm. Barely even a drop of blood, nothing worth that suffocation. My blood is of the normal consistency, I won’t bleed to death from a needle prick.

Another useless doctor’s visit. This one was my choice. It wasn’t my choice to go at ten in the morning, but my choice none the less. They only took two vials. Strange. The norm is five. I feel ripped off.

“That was quick,” my mom says from behind me. I hand her the used wrap and get in my car. She follows suit and I pull out of the parking lot, heading for home.

I’ve been referred to someone else. That’s what doctor’s do when they realize that they’re screwed. What’s that saying? Up a creek with no paddle? Yeah they lose their paddles. If they ever had one to begin with.

She’s sending me to a dermatologist. For my head. I have no hope for this. Having hope can only hurt me. People always say to keep hope alive. But that’s not the way to go. Have hope and all you’ll feel is disappointment. It’s like walking into a movie, you’re expectations already high from great reviews and positive word-of-mouth. That movie can never meet those expectations. You’ll feel disappointment. George Lucas knows how that goes. So all those high expectations and keeping hope alive can kill a person.

Understandably, after years of doctor’s, my hope has dwindled. Now, I don’t want to feel it. And I hate myself when I do. I actually have this thought that someone will help. A new doctor that I’ve never met before, that one will be able to do something. So every time that nothing happens, I have to pretend. Pretend that I wasn’t hopeful and I expected it.

But I’m alive. I have all of my limbs and I’m not suicidal. Depressed? Sure. That comes with everyone. I hate that word. Depressed. Depression. It’s a fashion statement now isn’t it?

I’ll have to wash my hair tonight and I dread it. I can’t pretend that everything is fine in the shower. You can’t ignore clumps of hair sliding down your thighs. It tickles. You can’t ignore the fact that your shower stops draining, your feet splash.

Pulling hair from a drain is disgusting, the fact that it’s my own does nothing to soothe me. The feeling, texture, I can’t look at it. I hold it away from my body, arm stretched out as far as it can go, almost expecting it to resist and go for my weak points. Plug up my nasal passages and slide down my throat, clogging it. I will never understand how cats can continually lick themselves, swallowing their own hair.

If I don’t touch my hair, if I don’t mess with it, I can forget that something is wrong. I stopped combing it a week ago. I clip it up straight out of the shower and never put it down. I just move clips around, holding the hair still. If I brush it, I’d need to clean the brush again.

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“Hey mom, come here, look at this.”

“Oh my god, did you ever take any?”

“Apparently not.”

Hundreds of pink pills are lined up against the wall, piled on top of each other, the majority have been broke in two. They look a whole lot smaller now, but when I was little I thought they were the size of horse pills. I used to have my mom chop them in half so I could swallow them. Although, I obviously didn’t take them regardless.

She breaks pills with her fingers, she just snaps them in half. I’ve always been amazed at that. I can never do that. I just end up rubbing them away (if they’re the white powdery ones anyway). But I distinctly remember these pink ones. She couldn’t break them with her fingers, she had to use a knife to chop them in half. The only pills I can remember in which she wasn’t able to use her fingers. Pill snapping is her power. These pink pill, they were like her kryptonite.

I purchased a new dresser, so I pulled this old one away from the wall to get rid of it. I didn’t know that I had my own medical cemetery.

I still don’t take pills very well. I just don’t bother hiding the castoffs now. I don’t bother pretending. I like to say that I don’t take them for the sole purpose of waiting for a reason. Meaning that when the day comes that something goes horribly wrong, I assume it will give me a reason to take them. Assuming that I don’t die of course.

I blame my first doctors. Cats. Catz. I don’t know how he spelled his name. Probably Katz. It seems right. He was in charge of me, along with his partner, since I was born. He moved to a different state when I was ten…nine?…no ten. I still think of it as his leaving me. Maybe that’s when everything went wrong. I liked him. He’s the only one I ever liked. I remember his mustache. It was thick and dark. He was the stereotypical Jewish guy. He really was. He was one of those people someone would look at and think ‘You know, I bet he’s Jewish’. They would be right.

He used to tell me that I was never to drink alcohol. I was never to smoke. Never to do drugs. It was against the rules. The rules of healthy living. No one follows those rules, but I’m someone who kind of has to. I’m sure one drink won’t kill me. But why start?

I loved Katz. I really did. I felt safe with him looking after me. He was my personal Jesus. The one who I could trust. Then it just came naturally. I trusted him because he took care of me. Like another parent. Only with a stethoscope and the tendency to probe my stomach.

His partner never made the same impression. He was nice enough. Nothing was wrong with him. He just didn’t stick like Katz did. His partner was overly cautious. My mom can tell stories of how the guy would stick me in the hospital when I sneezed. Katz would come back from wherever he ran off too, and take me back out. He was more comfortable with what he knew.

I don’t remember which one is to blame. Some doctor told me that taking medications when they aren’t needed is dangerous. I think they were just trying to make sure I didn’t run rampant with my pills. It had the reverse affect. The idea of swallowing drugs does not put a smile on my face. I don’t like it. I will take them for a week and if I feel no difference, I will stop. Why keep taking them if I feel no difference?

I’ve had more than those two. It could have been any of them. They were an hour from my home. I had two local doctors. A woman and a man. Whitely and Rendler. They had two offices and I bounced between the two locations. Whitely was the best of the two. She was nice. A motherly type. Now thinking back, she looked like Martha Stewart, without the satanic vibe. She was there since my birth too. They both were.

The four doctors were my A Team.

Katz was the first to go. I wrote him a letter once. I felt abandoned. We didn’t even know his address so I don’t remember where we sent it. I have to believe that it didn’t get to him. He would have wrote back if it had. After Katz left, it was his partner to go. That was years later. I may have been just starting High School. That didn’t bother me too much. Whitely left a year after he did though, that bothered me. She was the last one I had left. Well the last one I really liked. She retired. I even went to her retirement shindig. It was in a hospital board room. I felt uncomfortable sitting in that small room with a whole bunch of people I already didn’t like. People started to give speeches. Tell her how much she meant to them. I instantly hated any other patients that were there. I didn’t give a speech. Why should these people be able to hear anything I would have to say?

Rendler didn’t leave. My family’s insurance was switched around and I could no longer see him. If I could, I would go back to him, but I can’t. The fact that he’s a pediatrician doesn’t really matter, the insurance wants to give me new doctors who I’ve never met. The worst part is having to give my life history.

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Questions that doctor’s always ask that always put a frown on my face:

On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your pain?