Vulnerable

I felt really weird walking back into a hospital where death and doom wasn’t shoved in my face. Sitting outside the admission office with other patients dressed in their pyjamas waiting patiently for our names to be called out so that we could voluntarily check ourselves into hospital was strange. I counted four of us in total, altogether, and assigned them their ailments one by one like I was in the firing squad shooting at deer. Pregnant! Hip replacement! Old age! Breast-

“Leeloo!”

I was popped out of my imaginary bubble and whisked back into reality as I anxiously march towards the direction of the voice and into the disgustingly white office.

I had to reassure my mum for the fifth time that I was fine and that she could, like, go. I was a big girl now, and could fend for myself, but she still somehow always made me feel like a big, adult, baby with large puppy dog eyes. And I bet that that’s what my anaesthetist thought, too, of me when he walked in through the door and saw Captain American as my background on my laptop. I immediately shut it, clumsily.

He was as tall as a friendly giant, skinny as a k-pop idol, and as eloquently dressed like Prince Harry. And when he spoke, he sounded like he had a huge mansion in Brighton, a wife, three kids, and a French bulldog. As I answer his questions I wondered what I sounded like. Unsure, naive, young, and nerdy?

I knew exactly how my ENT surgeon sounded like, though. Sure and piercingly confident. The complete opposite of me. They spoke charmingly like James Bond, and like they had just spent the night having mind blowing sex with a supermodel on a million dollar yatcht only to leave in the morning for another mission. He was the sexy kind of cool that I imagined up ages ago, but never thought actually existed in male form, and I, kinda, liked that.

I stripped away my last security blanket when I put on that hospital gown. There was no turning back now. I was a little lamb on my way to slaughter house about to be eaten alive. Tubes poked out of my body in all directions, no make up, and my hair inside a fish net. I felt soo naked and ugly. But out of the corner of my vision I saw a hint of red light up in his eye. My intuition responded like a paint brush drawing all wild, crazy, and stupid things. And then the last thing I remembered before blacking out were their blue eyes staring back at mine.