Tormented Hands

I am in the hospital once again, this time I am sure I am being tormented by invisible hands. 

The sickly clean hospital smell seems to cling to me no matter how freshly washed my clothes are. It disgusts me. 

The black moving spots on the floor seem to hallucinate me with my ever-worsening sight. It worries me. 

The wandering spider I catch with my eye describes me.

Floating from one dead end to another. I try to help it and direct it with my foot to make sure it is not harmed like me by the rolling trolleys and computers trundling up and down the corridor. 

Computers that hold all your health history, mind, body, and an absence of soul. Over 150 options for your religion to select from, Wiccan, Black Magician, Satanist, Druid, and even Goddess yet no God. I found that sexist so I put down I was a Shaman. Ask a stupid question. 

Maybe my protests are the reason I was set apart from my fellow suffering males discriminated against by the all-seeing new NHS computer system, and put in this side room, a room with many secrets. 

Locked up in a solitary room, it's a bit like a prison cell but without the smell of bodily odour and snores from other roommates. Plus I get an ensuite with a broken shower. Bonus. 

I really shouldn't have broken them all in 2021 when I stayed here. All I wanted was a nice hot power shower after a week of rotting in the IVU. How was I supposed to know it leaked downstairs onto the kid's emergency ward?

I guess that was another mark on my file. 

To be honest it's better than being in a bay of the dying and crying. Not one person have I seen who might be on a level with me. Not that there is a large selection of the population who could be, count yourself lucky I am even reciting this to you. 

Call me paranoid?

You're not, if they are really after you. 

I mean what else do you expect after the COVID lockdown destroyed your social ability and you live alone? 

Stuck upstairs due to bad legs, hiding from them, keeping yourself curtain twitching, thinking every moving object is one of their agents, creeping up on you. 

Maybe I do get a bit noisy and excited when I am taken to the hospital and get to talk to people. Maybe I am not used to it. All the sound, chatter, and sudden excitement of actually being around other human beings. 

So I have been moved into a side room because as one white-coated man whispered at me in a Portuguese accent I am “something something positive”. 

Well, I know I am positive about one thing, this room is a glare, I don't doubt people sit behind the crappy painting of an open window to a sea view watching me, taking notes, and passing them up the chain. The oddly positioned screw above it at a weird angle betrays the original intent. 

Ken McCallum, if you are listening tell your bosses over the pond I don't care for your MI5 dirty tricks and ploys to spy on dissidents. They are too easy to spot. 

I don't dare mention the A word near my phone for she will appear, invisible hands from Steve Bezos trying to sell me the last word my phone heard, but of course that is just the decoy. 

It has to listen and record you constantly just to know if you mention the A word at all, the in-between conversation is obviously logged, processed, and diluted before being sent to some 3-letter agency. If I could rip Alexa (shhh) away I would but Google is always there. The CIA’s bypass to stealing secrets worldwide legally. There is no escape from the CIA's Google. 

Some may call me paranoid, but my shrink certainly does. It took two whole lines of a letter to list out my supposed mental illnesses. 

I am sure your granny would grab a nearby cutlery instrument if she heard all of them read to her in my presence. That is if she knew what all the acronyms meant. Society doesn't call schizos like me mental anymore, I find that age-old verbal offensive. 

I know though, like your gran, I am always in search of a tool and planning ways to protect myself if someone I don't know sits down near me at any time.

Don't call me paranoid, that is just ignorant, swap it for prepared and awake. You never know who that bespectacled man in a tweed jacket pretending to do the crossword really could be. 

I look up at the constant buzzing from a seemingly broken light in the ceiling. I am sure the red light constantly flashing at me through the corner is some sort of a camera. Filming me 24/7, watching me sleep, wriggle, and try and keep onboard this narrow sagging single bed they have me on.

Sometimes I can hear my name being mentioned outside by the tormentors telling the next shift when to come in and wake me up to stab, scratch, and stick tubes in me. I can make out my name and my age and where I am, then it’s hushed tones that I cannot identify. 

Are they passing on info about how to torment me better, I've already had prescribed meds withheld due to dispensary "issues" and of course their new "EPIC" failure of a computer system that doesn't let you remove drugs you are no longer allergic to. Upping and downing dosages of highly psychoactive medications can affect my brain function. They are constantly messing with my mental cognitive ability with their new computer program.

I could have coded the government a better app for a 100th of the price the NHS churned out for their current chutney of a system they named EPIC. Nurses and doctors are heard all day long up and down the corridor cursing its total non “EPIC” existence. This is the system that runs everything now, from the timing of your medications to the timing of your torment, it is an EPIC torture system at times in my humble opinion.

When I finally got my meds to get me to sleep tonight that was the start of the invisible hands tormenting me. 

2 hours after I got to sleep, a nurse comes into my room and attempts to put a beeping drip into me but the line has tissued again. "Your veins are crap", she curses before calling IVAS, the blood specialists. The door isn't closed quietly as she angrily leaves. 

Only 30 minutes must have passed before another nurse enters the room with a yellow tray. I sit up. She isn't IVAS but reckons she can get blood. I laugh and fall back on my bed and lie there semi-awake as she turns my arms into a bloody dart board for over thirty minutes with the bright room lights turned on to ruin my tired bloodshot eyes. Is there any respite for the wicked?

Another failure and curse on the way out and I try to get back to sleep but the sounds of beeping and patients calling for help prevent me from my aim at getting some peace. 

It is about half an hour later and I am just about drifting off to sleep again when I am stirred by the shadows of someone new. Then Jake a member of IVAS who I regularly meet here when my red soul-carrying essence is needed, appears from the shadows. 

I try to say a few words to greet him but I am mumbling now due to the late dose of my medications and the extra-strong painkiller they now have me on. 

I feel like a zombie at this moment not knowing what is real or just a vivid dream. 

Out of the corner of one half-opened eye, I make out Jake’s UV screen, flashing white pulsing circles as he digs his needle around deep into my arm. He is constantly telling me how much worse my veins have gotten since he last saw me. He always does. 

One day there won't be any left for him to torment me with his tools of steel, then he will cry inside. Just like me. 

Arteries tangled with hardened scarred veins in a loopy chain, now crisscross my body I hear Jake say before chuckling funnily he always does. 

I hardly feel a thing now as his needles constantly dive deep vertically, again and again, into my pale anemic flesh. 

I am so used to this feeling after all these years of unwanted visits. Maybe all my nerves have died along with my insides. My brain is aging and so are my senses. 

This place denies me sleep for fun I reckon. A place where your body is just another staff member's play thing. 

However, it is not long before I hear another cackled laugh from Jake. He must have hit the jackpot, he eventually always does. 

I manage to mumble a goodbye as he mentions that he will probably see me again soon and I drift off to sleep as the sound of wheels trundling across the floor dissipates. 

I don't know how much sleep I get before the nurse with the hanging bags of fluid reappears to put the new cannula to use. 

She is using the pump so I know I am going to be accompanied by beeps for the next hour if my arm isn't laid out straight. You can't beat the early warning beep though and it wakes me again not much later. 

No one comes to stop its horrible sound and take me off it. So I turn the machine off myself now that it has finished pumping strong laxative-inducing antibiotics into me, and detach the line from my cannula with my teeth, I have got used to doing this. I know I will get told off by whoever eventually comes to do the job but I need to cross my arms over my chest. I don't feel safe unless I do. 

Eventually, a nurse appears and wakes me just to scorn me for knowing how their equipment works. I am past caring and let her ramble on as she flushes the line before again storming out of the room. 

Bliss I finally think but I can already see the corridor's bright light seeping under the door. 

How much more time do I have left I wonder. Either to sleep or to live, I don't dare ask myself, scared of either answer. 

I start to feel the pain seep back into my body and know there is no more chance for any rest, it must be morning. My painkiller is wearing off and my leg is itchy from the new nerves growing back inside my ulcers. It hurts badly, I need some more Oxy and soon. It has been a wasted chance at sleep.

A night in the hospital with invisible hands scratching, impaling, and tearing my skin all night. Red blood specks surround me all over my bed and top. It's a testament to their reality, I am not dreaming, unfortunately. 

These are the marks of the invisible hands who have tormented me all night. Should I bear them with pride or disgust I wonder staring at each spot of blood. 

However, these stains are also the mark of the hands that will ultimately save me. 

So for that all you electronic spies and evil paranoia-inducing eyes that allow the power to watch and plot on how best to torment me “GO TO HELL”. 

I am sure the NHS will handle it, just like they handle paranoid Alexa vexers like me. 

Hopefully. 

However just as I am starting to stir and awake a nurse comes in with some of my medication, my painkiller, and some pills. I smile. 

They are crazy in here, enough to keep me awake all night then just as I wake, they come and give me meds that will send me back to sleep. That’s good doctoring I guess.

The tormenting has stopped now, and it may be 5am but I am sure they know what they are doing. I laugh internally.

I roll onto my front and put a pillow over my head with my hands on top so that no one will dare annoy me now and fall back to sleep. 

I have won the battle and finally drift off into blackness.

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