Don't Take Me Away

Psychological illness hurts everyone...

Once I found a yellow piece of paper with green lines, and on it I wrote a poem. I showed it to my mother who smiled and said it was so beautiful because yellow is a brain-stimulating colour, then hung it on the refrigerator. Through everything I’ve seen that poem still hangs. It reminds me that she still cares, my mother still loves me. Sometimes I need that, and it depresses me to know that I do, but then again I believe everyone is like that.
Nothing was wrong in those days. I was healthy for weeks at a time when I was still writing poems... I miss that.
Now I look in the mirror and all I see is a ghost. My eyes sink deep into my skull, dark circles of hypochondria and malnutrition residing underneath them. I can’t remember the last time I slept right, that my body has felt a glimpse of health. I’m 12 years old but looking in the mirror depresses me because my face looks 50. It’s okay though. I know my mother still loves me. She still cares for me. I never thought it would get to the point where I was so desperate to know that, but it has.
It really started one morning when I was having an especially difficult time walking to school. The wind kept pushing me around, and I couldn’t even see straight, let alone walk. I really felt as though I was going to die, I was stumbling too much. Everyone just laughed at me as they walked by. “Silly 6th grader,” they laughed. “Stupid little Kenny, can’t you even hold your own against the wind?” That depressed me. I made it, though, sinking into my seat as if I were hiding from everyone when I got there. My stomach flew into some all-too familiar turmoil; I was feeling really nervous and shaky. I felt my heart rate begin to pick up, and my breathing started to shorten. I couldn’t focus on anything... Nothing was too unusual or anything, I just felt like everything was going to go horribly. I get like that a lot. I don’t much remember school that day, just the overwhelming feeling of uneasiness that lived in my stomach the whole time. I guess that was pretty normal too, though. Walking home went about the same as walking to school, only the wind died down. This time, instead of the wind depressing me, the people sitting on the pavement asking for change were making me uncomfortable. I really hate Manchester. It’s not that I don’t like the city or anything, the people just depress me.
When I made it home, my mother welcomed me with open arms and some hot tea with milk, like she always does. That always makes me feel better after a long day.
Later that night, I felt a rushing headache begin to set in. My vision became tinted red, and I could have sworn the lights started to flicker. I grabbed ahold of my head as I swayed to the side, hitting a wall and sliding down towards the carpet until I was completely crouched down, huddling on the floor as my head screamed from the piercing migraine and my ears started ringing with a dull, tormenting buzz. I felt my mind trying to outrush the pain, thinking about how my head was about to explode, creating a beautiful, bloody work of art in the hall as my intestines screamed and wriggled inside me. I couldn’t breathe anymore so I brought my knees up to my chest, as if it would somehow assure me that my heart was still beating and I was still alive. I felt soft tears soak my cheeks and became dizzy, closing my eyes because everything around me was turning black anyway...
I’m not sure how long I was passed out, but I woke up in bed to my mother’s smiling face and a plate of warm cinnamon flavoured apple sauce. Shakily, I took a spoon and ate a few bites of it. The warmness in my mouth calmed me along with my mother’s warm embrace. Things felt okay for once, and I think I fell into a calm and peaceful sleep for a short while.
Apparently I missed another day of school. I’m always absent on account of being ill, so I didn’t even feel like taking the time to bother getting my missing homework again. Things went okay for a while, until I came home again. I was beginning to believe something was wrong with my house, I had panic attacks and end up passing out almost daily, some amount of time after my mum gave me my afternoon tea. Was I really that ill?
After about a week, I began developing this cough. I would walk around the halls after lunch and suddenly my chest would constrict and I couldn’t breathe at all and I coughed until I was really dizzy. One day this happened, and it was so bad that I collapsed against a row of lockers, tasting blood as it gurgled up into my mouth, choking out the air I would otherwise breathe. The world began to spin in the opposite direction �" I swear, for a moment, it really did �" and I could vaguely hear a group of kids laughing at me. “What’s wrong, Kenny? You’re too pathetic to even stand up now?” I don’t know if that was really said at all, I just remember hearing it. My vision was really blurred, but I thought I saw Mr. Elbogen’s blurry figure reach out to me, picking up my nimble 41 kilogram frame, and felt him carry me to what ended up being the nurse’s office.
“Kenneth? Can you hear me? Kenneth!”
I grunted. I could hear him, yes, but I was scared of coughing up blood when I tried to speak. I kept feeling these mini-coughs come up in my throat as I was being carried by my English teacher. Some blood must have come up with them, because I remember feeling his pace quicken before I lost consciousness.
When I woke up, I was in a bed in this white room. My head was spinning. The fluorescent lights on the ceiling constantly hummed, and that didn’t help. I didn’t know where I was, but I didn’t care. I didn’t feel anything. I was convinced that I was dead for a while, and thought that heaven was a really weird place. I looked down at my arm and noticed that there was a needle in it. The needle was connected to a bag, hanging off a long, silver pole. A screen with green lines that beeped every few seconds was located over my head. I couldn’t figure out what purpose any of these things served, but, as I said earlier, I wasn’t in the mindset of caring about anything. I shut my eyes and let my thoughts take over for a while.
I don’t know how long I was kept in that white room, but it seemed like weeks before I got home. When I awoke in my own bed, my mum was there to explain to me that I had spent a day in the hospital. It was my first time ever staying in a hospital, which honestly should have seemed a lot weirder than it did on account of my always being ill, but the thing is, it didn’t. I knew it was only because my mother cared about me enough to take good care of me when I’m sick, and that we never needed a real doctor. I was always thankful about that.
The next day was really hectic because we kept getting a copious amount of ‘get well soon’ notes, mostly from all of my mum’s mates. I was never popular.
It only took me a day to recover once I was home, and I was back to school again. I wrote a thank you not to Mr. Elbogen because he cared about me instead of laughing like everyone else was doing. I felt like he deserved more than that from me, but it was all I could have given him, so I had to do at least that. When I gave it to him, he smiled at me and told me that I didn’t need to. I told him that it’s okay and that I wanted to. Honestly, though, I know that I did need to. I needed to know that someone other than just my mother cared about me. I don’t know why, but I just had to.
When I got home, I noticed that the lights were flickering worse than usual, and I thought I was seeing shadows in the walls. There was this girl and she kept moving around and her hair kept blowing in the wind. I didn’t know why she was there. She wasn’t doing anything at all. She was just there. Then, I saw blood start to run down the side of the walls in my hall, like blood pouring from a severed pulmonary artery and I swore that the shapes of faces would appear in it and laugh at me. “What!” I screamed, “what the heck do you want with me?!” Clenching my teeth, pinching my tongue so that it started to bleed in attempt to keep from screaming more, I made a rush for my room. Every step I took seemed more out of line in respect to the last. My head bashed itself into the walls from both angles as I attempted to carry myself down the hall, tripping over my feet with every step taken.
I thought I heard a chandelier fall to the floor and shatter behind me, and I instinctively grabbed my heart and crouched to the floor in a panic. I tripped over myself in the process and it felt like I was falling onto hundreds of glass shards littering the floor, slicing my skin and causing blood to ooze out onto my clothing. I couldn’t see myself or anything; I just imagined that’s how it must have looked, like it does in the films. My eyes were going black again...
I woke up, halfway, sometime later. I could feel my body lying in a bed. It was a soft, feathery, comfortable bed. I swore I could feel needles penetrating my skin... Shots, maybe? My mind felt sick at the thought, nauseated even. Was I getting a lethal injection..? I was awake but I couldn’t wake up! I wasn’t able to open my eyes to figure out what was happening to me at all, I felt powerless.
The feeling of being awake and not being able to wake up went away and I fell back asleep until I woke up completely this time. My entire body ached, and I felt an overwhelming urge to throw up. I don’t want to talk about what happened over the next few hours because it was really painful and kind of embarrassing, but I will tell you that my mother was there to help me through it and offer a comforting hand.
That was why what happened the next day confused me so much. I was convinced that something demonic was happening to me, that maybe God and the devil were fighting over my soul and it was making me sick and I kept almost dying until the other one saved me. I never would have guessed what really happened.
A man dressed in black knocked on the door and asked for me. Mum didn’t want to let him in, but I snuck up behind her and said hello to him so that she had to. He took my hand and asked me how I was feeling. “Sick,” I said, “but really, I always am, so you shouldn’t worry.” I smiled at him.
“We’re going to make you better, Kenneth, we are worried about you.” He gave my hand a gentle squeeze. “But everything will be better, okay? I just need you to come with me to see a doctor for a little.” His smile was gentle and heartfelt.
I shook my head. “I don’t need a doctor, sir, I have my mum. She loves me very, very, very much.”
I saw sadness in the man’s eyes. “That’s why we need to take you, Kenneth. Your mum will be okay, I promise. We’re going to make things better for her, too. You’ll see.”
I bit my lip, but went along with him. He took me into an ambulance and rode with me in the back of it. I had never been in an ambulance before; it looked like the white room of the hospital from earlier, but smaller and with a lot more shiny stuff. I was lying on a white rolling bed. I thought it was strange because I wasn’t very sick at that moment and I could have sat up just fine, but the man told me that it was just better that I lay down. I looked over at him. “Are you an angel?”
He laughed a bit. “I wish, Kenny, I wish.”
When we got to the hospital, he rolled me up to another room on the bed thing they had me on. I was able to get up when we actually got to the room, though, and that made me feel better. Being rolled around on a bed is a really weird feeling and I didn’t like it. I was told that a doctor would ask me a few questions, and I complied. In the room I met a lady who called herself Stephanie. She asked me a lot of questions about my mother, which I thought was really strange. After I answered them, I thought she was about to cry, but I never saw her if she did. She left the room for a while and when she came back she told me that I would have to stay with some other kids in a place she called a mental health facility. I didn’t understand what she meant, but she made it sound like things were really nice there, and that people would care about me a lot, so I was okay with going.
I’ve been at the mental health facility for two months now. I’ve been feeling a lot healthier since I’ve been staying here, and the food isn’t even that bad! So far they have told me that my mother seems to have something called Munchausen’s by Proxy Syndrome. They say that she would poison my afternoon tea in order to make me sick because she wanted the attention that came with it, and that was why I got sick every night. When it worked, it progressed, and she also put drugs in my lunches that I brought from home, and that was the reason why I had such a horrible cough, and the reason I was seeing things like flickering lights was just a side effect of the drugs. They were even saying that they believe she may have gone as far as injecting things like urine into my body and tampering with the equipment when I was at the hospital just so that I would get sicker. That way she would have sympathy from others, too. I couldn’t believe it, and I still don’t. I know my mother wouldn’t hurt me because I know that she loves me... At least, that’s what I want to think. Nobody wants to believe that their own mother is killing them, though. Especially not because that’s the only way she would feel loved.
Everyone just keeps telling me that it isn’t my fault and that everything will be okay. I hear that every day. “You’ll be okay, Kenneth. None of this is your fault.” They say that when I leave here, I’ll be put in foster care and that I’ll finally feel healthy every day. I want to believe them; I want to think that everything will be okay. I miss my mum, though. I know I will always miss her. They keep telling me that everything will be better now because she can’t hurt me anymore but I don’t care. I miss her all the same.