I am at work. I have just seen my first patient of the day and returned to my operating room to prepare, when the anesthesia nurse returns immediately with the patient in question. My frustration mounts. “What on earth are you doing?” I plead.
He only shrugs in silence. We needed more time to prepare the room, my technologist and I. The toughest thing about working in the operating room as a nurse is that you have no agency of your own. Its supposed to be a team environment, but the nature of the healthcare system turns every position against each other. Less turnover time, less overhead, who cares what the nurse needs, the anesthesiologist, the surgeon? That patient has been waiting, take them back to the OR so we can put another in their space… The corporate mantra is to pit everyone against each other so we compete, the ensuing pandemonium moves patients in and out faster, and keeps employee turnover high… so no one can ever stay long enough to get payed appropriately.
The case begins. It is instantly ended and post-op care is full. There are more blank stares from the post-op staff. I can see them through the phone. We must now wait. I and my technologist clean and clear the room while the patient sleeps. There is a pile of paperwork I am organizing, I drop m head to focus on its meaningless characters. When I again lift my gaze to the room another anesthesia nurse has entered the room with my next patient. I raise my hands in disbelief. I now have two patients in the same room. This is very unsafe. I am dumbfounded at my predicament. I curse and whine at the anesthesia staff but they again do nothing but shrug. They do not even lift their eyes. There is silence.
I have to leave the room, I need to breath. My hands are shaking with frustration. I exit the room through a blur and immediately into the outdoor parking garage. I make my way towards the exit. It is a wide garage with a low ceiling opening up to a worn and cracked asphalt road ahead. Ahead of me is a ragged line of young women walking from my left to right just before the exit
They are all radically different heights weights and body types. Each of them is Repulsive in different ways. Their hair is ragged and wiry, they are grossly thick with cellulite or sickly skinny, extremely ugly and unpleasing. All of them have poor skin covered in red scabs and acne, scaly hands, disease. Each one however, wears a bright red cocktail dress. The dresses fit each of their ugly owners as if professionally fitted. Each dress wears and flows like a runway model’s in juxtaposition with their gross appearance otherwise. An extremely corpulent individual walks past me partnered with a tall and skinny kyphotic partner.
They see me and begin to call out for my attention. I believe there are seven or eight of them, I cannot count for sure. The others take notice. They speak like sirens. Their sweet words sound cordial and wanting but I do not believe them. Each set of eyes is focused on me, unblinking, like wolves who have found prey. The expressions on their faces are stern and smirking as they tell me to wait, hold on a second, come back, just a minute. Their voices whine in sarcastic desire.
I am past them when the begin to follow me. I am walking faster out of the parking garage, beginning to run. There is no desire in my mind to remain close. I run directly from the building across the street into a large junkyard. If I can lose them in the stacks of destroyed vehicles I can escape. They make chase and I run faster. They run after me limping and sickly, but swiftly, covering great distances with each step.
I am circling around vehicle after vehicle. There are dilapidated concrete columns around me holding up an upper level hundreds of feet above extended from the garage across the street. Great thick rays of sunlight filter down on the crushed metal and plastic. The women are slowing, I am losing them. I reach the end of the Junkyard and manage to leap over a high chain link fence into the street adjacent. There is time to rest.
I have traveled blocks from the hospital where I work. The area where my workplace rests is in a tightly knitted urban university on the side of a mountainous area. I am now in a distant side street unfamiliar to me. I can see the top of my building far away over the cityscape of jagged urban edges. For the time being, the day is bright and full of sun, a cloudless day. There is a moment to enjoy it.
In my moment of exhale, I feel a light tickle in my right wrist. I look down to see a small parasitic worm beginning to exit from the center of my wrist. Its a small, thin pale yellow worm, Like a soft wet string or a noodle trying to make an exit. I cant tell how long it is but I have a feeling its quite long and most of it is still within my arm. Long ago, deep in my memory, exists a memory of a documentary about a parasitic worm in the jungles of Africa. Something called the Guinea worm. A long thin parasitic worm that grows in the body to multiple feet in length, then makes its eruption to further disperse its eggs into the environment. I’m confident this is the parasite I see now. I can feel it writhing under the skin of my right arm below my wrist. The few exposed inches slither back and forth searching for something new to cling to. I don’t want it to return to its hiding place. The wound does not bleed but only weeps light red fluid and clear oil. My immediate thought is to return to the nearby emergency department of my employer, its so far away now and my sense of direction is not accurate.
There is a leather glove in my pocket, I cover my parasite infested wound with the glove and secure it with medical tape as I begin to run frantically in the direction of my familiar building. My left hand is clutching my right arm as I begin to sprint.
As I am running, my directions change. I turn to a street to my left and look up and realize my target has moved far to the right. I turn to face it and it shifts left as if I’m standing of the center of a great disc and the outer edge over-corrects my movement. It makes sense to me that I should run through the buildings in my way towards my target rather than taking the streets, this way I can keep my target from moving in my vision ahead of me. I burst through the nearest door.
Ahead of me is an impossibly long auditorium classroom. I stand at the top of a stadium of seats a hundred levels high. The ceiling slants with the angle of the auditorium seating. It is narrow, however, only wide enough two students at a desk to my left and two of the same to my right. The entire left wall is floor to ceiling windows the entire way down, they illuminate the entire length with bright natural light. It is a long, slanted, narrow tube leading down to an instructor. The students have blocked the aisle in the center with stacks of bags and books. Each set of desks has a very modern glass barrier in front of the students extending up from the desk and down from the slanted ceiling. It is thick tempered glass and aluminum framed like a bank teller’s window. There is space enough between each that I can easily fit. I begin to vault down through the levels over the desks. I can leap from each desk and swing easily through the space in between the glass visors. I find myself flinging through the spaces like a primate sailing down from his jungle canopy. The feeling is that of complete effortlessness. My hands grip the Aluminum frames of the hanging visors with ease, I do not tire, only pausing to check my gruesome companion under the bandage on my right arm. It has extruded itself further and sits writhing in a loose golf ball sized knot under its covering. The tingling feeling in my arm does not cease. As I pass quickly by the students, they remark dryly about my incursion, only to go silently back to work as I pass. I cannot hear their words, only their tone.
The instructor at the head of the class does not ever turn from his work or acknowledge me in any way. As I close in on his position deep at the end of the tunnel class I notice a balcony to my right heading out towards my destination. I leap to it and head up the hallways stairs to and perpendicular hallway filled with people. In this hallway is what appears to be a staging area. It is tightly filled with people I used to know. Groups of young musicians I used to know are waiting in queue for some goal that I am unaware. They call to me happily in the surprise of my abrupt appearance. I reply in relief. Their presence is calming and familiar to me. I can see through a large window just beyond them my target destination in the distance. I turn to the left down the hall to jump ahead of the long line of young people.
The hall continues for fifty paces and opens into a rectangular amphitheater courtyard. Standing at the upper ring, the center of the courtyard is a grassy depression a steep thirty feet down from myself. It is close in size to a tennis court. The grass in the center is well manicured and a wonderful bright green. Two levels of concrete walkway encircle the outer walls. It is very clean and sharp. The sky above is still bright blue and cloudless. Around the outer walls are doorways with maroon concrete chalice planters on either side. The walls of the two levels are flocked in black and maroon, the doorways matte black. The whole place has a grand victorian look to it. At the base of the courtyard waits a man in coat-tailed tuxedo. He is showing my young musician friends in groups to the rooms. This must be some sort of hotel. I cannot stay to learn more. I check my right wrist to see that the long parasite has retreated back into my arm and only barely a centimeter remains waiving from its emergence.
I sprint across the upper level and jump up onto to the upper wall, it is as if I am on top of a building. I look at the wound in my arm and concentrate. I clench my fist with all my strength in an attempt to extrude the worm. It works, and the thing begins to slowly slither outward again. I breathe slight relief and run on towards my goal.
I am now above the city. It is so bright and warm up here. The sky is still it’s marvelous cloudless blue, the sun is so bright although I do not see it. The buildings tower in grandiose architectural fashion around me. Huge buttresses, giant stone brutalist monoliths mixed with Victorian bordered windows and dark color. All is concrete, stone, marble, dark maroon. They cast deep shadows against each other. The between the buildings the chasms are so deep I cannot see the streets, just the deep shadowed abyss. They tower around me as I move along the large wall towards the entrance of my building. It is nearer now, I can see it to my left as I cross the narrow concrete bridge leading from the hotel, clutching my wrist.
My concrete walkway parallels itself above a huge stone staircase, as I run along I see far down to my left that I have past the front doors of the hospital. The concrete path terminates at the top of the great stair. I turn and run down to the left towards the huge entrance. The hospital entrance is a massive maroon stone monolith. The wide stone stair leads down to a bank of entrance doors with intake desks in the open air. The building rises from deep within the city. Down to its left and right are the crevasses of streets far out of view below. I seem to arrive somewhere near the top. The great stair is a football field wide and its as long of a walk down to the doors.
Halfway down, I come across members of my family. They are earlier versions of themselves. My adult sister and brother are now the child versions of themselves just as in my distant memories. They follow closely behind my adult wife. They seem to be just passing by as I greet them. We part and continue.
At the foot of the brutalist concrete structure I arrive at an intake desk and sit immediately. It is a large old bank desk with a very pleasant black gentleman sitting across from me. We sit outdoors in the shade of the massive building, a line of the same desks and the same man extent to my right. There is a leather cover topping the desk that matches the dark maroon of the building. He is wearing a maroon suit and his dark hair is grown out to about an inch in length. He motions for me to begin speaking with a soft an understanding face. I clench my right fist still feeling the fluttering of the parasite within my arm. I remove the ragged bandage to reveal the worm, only inches exposed now, wriggling out of my arm. I plead for help.
I am in mid sentence. In one smooth motion the man reaches up over the table and grasps the yellow worm in my right arm with his bare hand. He pulls swiftly whipping the soft worm entirely from my arm. The entire gross thing comes free, I can feel its soft sliding tickle the whole way along my as it exits. I feel barely any resistance and am struck by his quickness, as well as the fact that the creature has not ruptured and left a fragment in my arm. He whips the thing through the air and it coils on the desk in front of him, it no longer moves. The expression on the man’s face is still that of quiet temperance. He reaches to a drawer on his right and provides me with a small bottle of clear liquid and a perfect white patch for a bandage. He smiles and nods as he reaches out and places the bandage on my wrist.
He returns to his seat as my surprise turns to relief. I feel myself relax into my chair at the desk and I look across at him. His eyes are at mine, he blinks slowly. The pleasant look on his dark face remains. The world around me blurs and melts. I open my eyes. I am in my bed, staring at the ceiling, in the dark.