Chapter 14
Nauseating pain gripped Jason's stomach as he laid down to sleep. The physical sensation of the nausea reminded him of the psychiatric medications he had taken about twenty minutes before. The moment he had this thought a slight shock to his brain caused his head to spasm.
The pieces began coming together.
Jason rose from his bed and walked into the kitchen, where his father was cooking some food. “I need to stop taking the meds. They're giving me stomach sickness.”
“You can't stop taking the meds.”
“But they're giving me stomach sickness.”
“That could be any number of things. Your mother and I need you to stay on the meds.”
The callous lack of understanding from his father forced a warp over Jason's mind. The injustice of being forced to ingest medications that were making him sick to his stomach enfolded his brain beneath unbearable pressure, which erupted. “That is sadistic! What do you think I am? One of those Iraqis? You must have carried your sadism back from the war! You are sadistic as hell making me do that!”
His father turned away and stared out the window.
Jason left the kitchen and returned to his bedroom, where he read a book to help him fall asleep. He decided that if his parents forced him to ingest medications against his will, he would pretend to take the medications and throw them away.
About fifteen minutes later there was a forceful knock at the door. “Jason,” his father said. “I need to talk with you.”
Jason sighed. Then he opened the door.
His father was holding pills in one hand and a glass of water in the other. “Take these.”
“But I've already taken my medications today. That's what made me feel sick.”
His father moved the pills and the glass of water closer to Jason. “I said take them.”
The tone of his father's voice was so disconcerting that Jason took the pills and washed them down with the water. “Can I go back to reading now?”
“I need to talk to you in the dining room.”
The strange intensity in his father's demeanor was disturbing to Jason. Prescience of approaching trouble tweaked his nerves as he followed his father into the dining room and sat across from him at the dinner table.
“You need to leave this house.”
“What?” The idea terrified Jason.
“I'm going to drive you back to that psychiatric institution.”
“But I'll take the medications.”
“You'll be taking the medications at the psychiatric institution.” His father rose and added, “We'll send you your stuff tomorrow. Come on.”
Jason obeyed.
When they reached the psychiatric institution a male employee met his father at the front door, while Jason reluctantly waited in the car. Although the conversation was out of hearing range, a glimmer of hope appeared, when the employee shook his head and Jason's father seemed irritated with it. As his father approached the car, Jason hoped the employee had changed his father's mind about committing him.
His father sat down in the driver's seat and said, “That psychiatric hospital is filled to capacity. We're going to the medical center downtown.”
“But I'm not sick with anything.”
“You'll only be there until they find a place to put you.”
When they reached the medical center, a tall and athletic orderly led Jason to an anteroom and handed him a hospital gown. “Put this on,” commanded the orderly.
Fearful of making the situation any worse than it already was, Jason removed his pants and shirt and donned the hospital gown, under the watchful eye of the orderly.
The orderly picked up Jason's clothes and said, “Sit down.”
Jason reclined on a medical chair.
The orderly left the anteroom and turned the corner into the hallway.
In front of Jason there was a partition with two glass windows to the right of an open doorway. Beyond these windows were hospital counters arranged in a half circle. Behind one of the counters another tall and athletic orderly sat typing at a computer.
Soon the orderly, who had taken Jason's clothes, sat down at one of the counters and began typing also.
A creepy looking doctor turned the corner behind the counters. He was heavy set and balding with large jowls covered by some facial hair. The man's facial features highly resembled those of a walrus with its whiskers full grown.
The doctor began slapping his cheeks in a comical fashion as he stared at Jason and approached the anteroom.
Jason found the display extremely strange and dismissed the doctor as some kind of overeager eccentric.
The walrus like doctor stopped in front of the anteroom. “I'll be right with you,” he said in a gruff and comical voice.
“Take your time,” replied Jason, not at all eager to be examined.
The doctor left into the hallway. A door opened nearby.
For a while Jason sat there staring off into space, wondering what they would do with him.
One of the orderlies glanced in his direction and said, “He's a spaz like Jessica.”
Jason assumed he was hearing things. It worried him that the voices could speak so understandably.
A hollow knock came from a room nearby and Jason once again assumed his ears were playing tricks on him.
After a tedious wait of over three hours, sitting and staring off into space, a sloth like doctor entered the anteroom followed by the two orderlies. The sloth like doctor held out a cup in one hand and a pill in the other. “Take this,” he said.
Too abated to refuse, Jason took the pill and washed it down with the thick and slightly sour orange juice.
“Evergreen, ever clear,” said the sloth like doctor.
Jason didn't like the tone of the doctor's voice as he had said that last statement. There was something strange behind those cryptic words, which Jason assumed was probably best ignored.
Jason's eyes felt too heavy to keep open as they placed him on a stretcher and wheeled him somewhere. He opened his eyelids briefly when they lifted the stretcher up off the ground to put him into the ambulance. Then he blacked out completely.
Jason awakened to the sound of somebody snorting something. A crusty hospital blanket covered his body and the mattress he lay on was stiff and unyielding. Somebody had changed his clothes to loose fitting pajamas. He was on the middle of three beds in a nondescript ward. The windows were barred so tightly he could hardly see outside.
Another snorting sound came from an open doorway to the right of the front door.
“Who is that?” asked Jason.
Jason rose from the bed and investigated the source of the snorting. A young and slender African American male around his own height, wearing pajamas like his own, stared blankly into the bathroom mirror.
A plain female in jeans and a t-shirt passed by the room in the hallway outside.
Jason approached her and said, “Somebody was snorting something.”
“They're doing it on the other side of the hall too,” replied the girl, nonchalantly.
The response confused Jason.
He left the room and looked around the ward. All the patients were males dressed in hospital pajamas and most of them looked like they were sleeping. He could see them laying on their beds through the open doorways. At the end of the hall a television played to an empty room.
Jason sat in a chair and watched a talk show for a while. Midway through the talk show, five young African American males in street clothes stood staring at him from the open doorway. Jason looked over in their direction and asked, “You want to change the channel or something?”
The African American male near the front of the group gave a disgruntled look and shook his head. Then they left.
Just before the show ended a male orderly entered the room and said, “It's dinner time.”
Jason followed the orderly to a small cafeteria. The food was so horrible that Jason settled for peaches and milk. Then h
e left back to his room.
On his way to his room he passed by an orderly behind a cart. The orderly said, “It's time for your medications.”
“I don't want to take medications,” replied Jason. “They make me sick to my stomach.”
The orderly stood silent as Jason traipsed back to his bed and lay down. Just as he began dozing off, the sound of footsteps intruded.
“Turn over onto your stomach and pull down your pants,” demanded an orderly.
Jason looked up. Four orderlies surrounded the bed and one of them was holding a needle. Jason did as he was told. The dull dissociation from his surroundings masked what would have been a degrading experience, as he received the injection in his left buttock. All he could think about was wanting it to be over so he could go back to sleep.
After the injection, the orderlies left the room, allowing Jason to drift back to sleep.
Later, one of the orderlies awakened Jason and said, “You need to take a shower.”
Jason rose from the bed and, groggily, he followed the orderly to the shower room. The door closed and Jason was left alone to take his first shower in this strange ward. He removed his shirt.
Before Jason could remove his pants, a painful shock coursed through his spine, twisting his back to the left. The force over his spinal column continued pressing to the left against the physical restrictions of his frame, causing excruciating pain. Deciding that a shower was out of the question, Jason tried to bend over to recover the shirt he had removed, but he couldn't. His spinal column was stuck. Overwhelmed by desperation, Jason felt the need to lay down in order to relieve the intense pain in his back. He lurched toward the door and entered the hallway, with his back still curved to the left.
“Put a shirt on!” demanded one of the orderlies as a patient nearby stared at Jason's predicament with a disturbed expression on his face.
“I can't,” replied Jason, rushing to his room to lay down.
Two of the orderlies moved toward Jason and then they simultaneously stopped.
Jason lay down on the bed, but the pain in his spinal column continued as his back contorted. It occurred to Jason that this was the onset of cerebral palsy. Never again would he live a normal life. At least he had fallen in love with a girl before this happened to him. Now it was all over. He might as well be dead.
Throughout the entire night Jason writhed on his bed, groaning beneath the unrelenting pain. The longer he suffered, the more he felt resigned to his fate. His old life was over now. He would be a cripple from now on.