The Sickness Lives Here.

The sickness lives here. I feel it every time I enter what is officially considered the school’s premises. It is not that I am recurrently falling into ill health by chance; it is that the sickness is sitting here, in this bedroom, in these classrooms, waiting for me to show up so it can infuse itself into my system. I lie down on my bed and back pains appear from the moon, non-existent just a few hours ago, and suddenly, I am finding it difficult to breathe. Whether or not I have eaten in the past few hours, I will inexplicably be experiencing heartburn. It is as if my entire biological system decides to malfunction the second it is introduced to this place.

Yes, I went to the hospital. No, I do not trust the results of the blood and urine tests, no matter how professional and efficient the procedures were. The doctors are wrong. I am not sick of typhoid. I am, quite literally, sick of HGIC. That is my affliction. But medicine simply has not progressed far enough to detect this fact. So, typhoid is the only thing they can understand it as.

Definitely, I am known for being a melodramatic person. But I express myself in the only way I can. So I will insist that to me, this place feels like a Dementor. It feels like if I stay here much longer, my soul will be irretrievable. I am being sucked dry and do not know how to do a thing about it. I do not know how to explain this. And try as I might, I am unable to convince myself that I am not the only person who feels this way with such intensity.

Listen. The medicine won’t work. I’m not sick because I’m sick. I’m sick because I’m here. The antibiotics don’t freaking understand that. Three weeks of symptoms that seem so mixed that it is difficult to understand what exactly I have, if even what I have is just one thing, and how to treat it, and why new, fresh waves of sickness and pain seem to be hitting me every two or three days.

My mind is as affected as my body. Sick in the flesh, sick in the spirit.

You are welcome to test my hypothesis. I am certain that once I am permanently (or even temporarily) removed from these premises, these symptoms will vanish like they were never even there. Me remaining here is the reason I never seem to be getting healthy. It is me being here, that is the reason why I am dying.

-Akotowaa