Kingdom of the Sick
The Kingdom of the Sick…I am now here and unable to leave.
This world is filled with IVs, orange colored bottles, and weakened humans
fighting for their lives.
Sometimes it feels like a modernized version of the “ho-hum”
in Pirates of the Caribbean. The yellowed walls and constant beeping seem to
chant “Yo-ho… yo-ho… a sickened life for me.” Instead of chains, we get tall
metal rods, bags of chemo, and long thin tubes attached to our veins. Instead
of torture, we get extreme nausea and waves of fatigue. We too have a horizon –
one of health and normalcy, but it feels distant and unattainable.
No one enters the Kingdom of the Sick by choice and none leave
the same person who arrived. For better or for worse, this place changes a
person. Some changes are physical—scars, bruises, hair loss. However, many
changes are the kind that alter our very essence. This world tests the core of
who you are, demanding answers to life’s most daunting questions at your
weakest state. No, the Kingdom of the Sick is not for the faint of heart.
Being here and in your 20s is lonely.
We youth are the few and far between. I am supposed to be in
my prime and have the world at my fingertips. I am supposed to be able to do anything I want to do. Yet here I
am…caught in the limbo between what is and what ought to be…the life I have and
the life I imagined.
I thought I would be living in my own apartment, starting a new
job, and forging my way into the business world after an equipping 4 years of
college. Instead of memos and meetings, I’m juggling appointments and
medications. I traded the business world for the medical one.
Oddly enough, I feel ready for this.
