Nine

I am a complex case. Their way of saying I am an inconvenience to medicine, an outlier in a system designed for answered questions, for clean narratives. There is no conclusion here, only the repetition of symptoms. My body refuses to be known, to be categorized, and that, I imagine, is what disturbs them most.

The hospital room is a sanctuary and a prison. I am unsure of if deserve it. Maybe the room will make sense of my body’s chaos. It feels absurd: the precision of doctors, the exactness of tests, the unpredictability of my body’s responses.

There is a specific detachment when you spend enough time in a hospital bed. As if the mind and the body begin to separate, no longer entirely responsible for the other. My body is handled, examined, pierced, monitored. And yet I am untouched. The experience of illness, of being ill, is outside . It belongs to the doctors, the nurses, the charts. It does not belong to me.

They ask me about my pain in numbers. Mine is a landscape. Shifting, changing, invisible, overwhelming. Pain is not an experience; it is a way of being. It seeps into every corner of my existence, shaping the way I think, the way I move, the way I hope.

The doctors have overlooked the truth of my body: it is uncontrollable. My body will not ease or submit. It has its own rhythms, its own logic. Illness is not something to be solved, but something to be lived.