[RF] Tubes and Wires
I think that I’m addicted to the doctor. The hospital downtown and the little family practices in the country, clinics and specialists of all kinds in the square miles between. The chapel is no less holy than the cathedral, and the Mass which they celebrate remains the same no matter how elaborate the Liturgy. The online portal allows me to impersonally schedule as many needless appointments as I want, without anyone to tell me of their needlessness. I schedule appointments at the slightest hint of bodily uncertainty, and my health insurance is fortunately good enough to accommodate my strange passion.
I am generally well-versed in medical concepts and terminology for someone with no formal background in the subject, my only credential being embodiment itself. I am the entire miracle of which the most gifted medical minds dedicate their careers to partially understanding parts, and I am the whole mechanism. The scholastics revere the part and resent the whole, considering me small, as if I were not at least their sum. Considering me undeserving, as if I were the ignorant pilot of a beautiful vessel and not the vessel in all its beauty and ignorance of itself, naively and endearingly humble rather than crudely unappreciative. The cartographers have no right to refuse their territory. They should have no right to deny me. I know with holistic certainty that I am wholly ill, and that my illness has little to do with parts. I am a fragile creature, depending on a perfect harmony of wet, fleshy machinery for every moment of existence, and its proclivity for rapid decay makes any lapse in functionality irreversible. The stakes of health are absolute, trumping any prior commitment. There is no life, only health, and in a strange way there is no death.
Nowhere do I feel as safe and contained as within the walls of the city’s only hospital, surrounded by the most serious and sophisticated of medical instrumentation and expertise. If something terrible were to happen within my body within those walls, their tubes and wires would not hesitate to envelop me with precise urgency, and they would do anything to maintain me. Limbs splayed in cardinal directions and made to inhale sweet gases, the cool and yellow-sterile skin naked under baby blue polypropylene and firm with goosebumps, its nerve endings unresponsive to a sedated brain’s half-hearted inquiry, mercifully unaware of the scalpel’s horrible movement, asleep and awake at once in dim fetal awareness, the IV’s fluid amniotic and its tubing umbilical in my elbow’s interior, my navel swallowing itself in defeat, my belly buttonless in the aftermath. The air in the whole ICU hangs thick like the contents of the IV bag, the IV bag now seemingly full of the room’s air. The faint fleshy orange-red of the sun as through eyelids being my endbrain’s only memory, the scalpel remembered only by a strained heart and split fascia. Teams of postgraduate degrees and hundreds of millions of dollars would fall over me unconditionally and without hesitation in my helplessly critical state, a truly justified emergency which no one would hope for, and only later would they ask any questions. By that point, the question of my continued existence would have already been settled, and so would the only question that ever mattered.
A long white jacket is, to me, no less clerical than the flowing vestments of a priest. I live for the feeling of being told by a man with a clipboard and a stethoscope that my body is in perfect working order, but I would die for one of them to suspect a problem, any problem, so that I could be prodded and penetrated with needles of all gauges and radiation of all kinds, from the electromagnetic to the ionizing. Most of them are seduced by my cheerily stoic demeanor and casually precise use of proper medical terminology, being worn down only slowly and uncannily by my frequent visits, each one of them seeming almost aggressively reasonable in isolation. Some of them recognize me as vaguely, inexplicably perverted from the second they call my name, beckoning me out of waiting rooms and into narrow hallways, finally toward my beloved sacrament.
Those who recognize me must still entertain my ecstatic anxiety out of Hippocratic obligation if nothing else, and so become the reluctant priests of my personal religion.