And so, after my literature class, I have to wait for nearly 4 hours prior to my epidural injection. I admit that I was very scared and now, after havingit, I hope I don’t have to do it again. Before arriving in St. Mary’s Medical Center, I was very scared. No one will actually understand or know how scared I was. However, I was also expecting my brother’s smell. I wanted to smell that I had smelled on December 2000. I missed that smell.
It got me thinking, even if he was still in the state where my parents or even himself do not wish to be in, everyone in my family would not be suffering. If he was still alive, in other words, even if he would only lie in the bed and unresponsive or even was still on a coma, he would actually made our family strong. Problems wil not appear as they do now. No one will miss him. Everyone will still visit him, and even if no one will, I think I would.
It would be better, actually, if he did not get the illness. As if he doesn’t, I will not be who I am now, I will not be doing what I am doing right now. I wonder what his major will be… Business or medical? I wonder which college will he attend? what would my parents do?
The smell in Mount E hospital will never leave my consciousness. I will never be able to forget it. Before, I have always thought that it is a smell of strong medicine. Today, while I was resting in the resting area after my injection, I smelled the faint smell of his again. It was a little different as his, because it was much more faint than the smell in the ICU room in Singapore. Today, I realized that it was the smell of the “clean” linens that they were using. Perhaps, in the ICU, they used a stronger antiseptic than those in St. Mary’s.
I wish none of these things happens. I wish I was the one who got his illness instead of him, a very happy and humorous person, someonewho can make the whole family happy, even the whole school were contented with him of his friendliness before he left us. I wish I did not have to do the epidural injection. How, I wish, instead of having the injection, I leave too, instead of him leaving our unhappy family. Whose faults is it that he left us in such an early period? Why does he have to leave us? These questions are unexpectedly unanswerable, but will never leave my head nor my heart.
If things happened differently before and now, I think this world will be happier.
It was not until his depart that I began to be afraid of pain. In case you don’t know, I was a very strong girl when I was young, both physically and emotionally. I did not cry when they hit me with rattan for more than 500 times. I did not cry when my parents had a fight or when someone else cried or when watching moving movies. After he left, I couldn’t help crying on random times, sometimes, unable to reason why I cried. After he left, it was as if my heart got softened, my body got weaker. I cried easily. I cried when I miss my friends, families and when I was recieving IV, injection or even to get my blood tested for god knows what. I know that I should not be this soft. But somehow, I couldnt help it at all.
The injection that Dr. Matthew Hannibal gave me this afternoon was not as painfull as the 500 strokes of rattan hitting my butt, but still I silently cried because it was a very painful procedures, to me now, not when I was in the past. He had told me earlier that it would be like “a pain of bee sting”. The truth is, I had never got bee sting, never in my life. I do not know if anyone noticed that I was really scared even before I was asked to change to hospital gown. I have no idea. When I was asked to lay on my stomach in the operation/xray table, I was even more scared. I was scared of the pain that would come, even when Dr. Hannibal had not even arrived. No one knows. I wish I did not have to do the injection at all. No one knows how ashamed I was when I have to do the injection. WHen the Dr. came and injected me the first anesthetic, no one knows how painful it was for me that I squeezed my own fingers, when he injected me with another needle, when the tube was empty, even though I felt pressure, I also had felt the pain, I was scared that I had to tell the Dr. that my back hurts. it was really nice that the second injection for anesthetic was not felt at all. However, once the tube was filled with the anti-inflammatory medicine and injected to my disk, it was an unbearable pain that I did cried silently and I guess no one realized that in the Xray room. Once I realized that I do not want to bear the pain any longer, as it was long to me, I kept saying how painful it was to me, however, no one was able to help.
I guess if I have to take 500 strokes of rattan hitting on my butt, I don’t think that I will survive without cry after the 30th. I hope I don’t have to recieve any more pain in the future.
If my leg and back pain does not go away in 2 months, I will have to arrange something else with the doctor.
All I want is no suffering, I want to leave, like my brother does, leaving me a memory of the clean, sterile smell.
I wish I was not born.