The Turning-Blood Ties 1 Read Free Page B

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    condition” and “acute anxiety and post-traumatic stress,” the latter affliction diagnosed in a rush interview conducted by the staff psychiatrist while I was in a morphine-induced haze.
    None of the articles mentioned John Doe’s missing body or the bizarre way the attendant’s body had been found. Either the police had neglected to mention these details, or the hospital had a crackerjack P.R. staff.
    The most uncomfortable visit had been Dr. Fuller’s. Apparently, it wasn’t enough for him to have written me off as a doctor. He had to write me off as a living person, too. He’d come to the end of my bed, my chart in his hand, barely acknowledging me as he read the details. Finally, he snapped the chart shut with a deep sigh. “Doesn’t look good, does it?”
    He was right. In the first week after my encounter with John Doe, I’d needed two surgeries. One repaired my damaged carotid artery, and the other removed the shards of glass embedded in my skull. In the recovery room after the first surgery, I flatlined, something my doctor noted later with a breezy wave of his hand, as though his disregard for the seriousness of the situation would somehow put me at ease. I’d also endured a delightful course of precautionary inoculations, including tetanus and rabies vaccinations. I didn’t think John Doe had attacked me in a fit of hydrophobia, but no one asked my opinion on the matter, and I certainly hadn’t been in a position to argue. During my lengthy hospital stay, I began to suffer strange symptoms. Most of them could be explained by post-traumatic stress, others as common side effects of major surgery. The first malady to show itself was a body temperature of one hundred and four degrees. This struck the night of my heart failure and subsequent resuscitation. I was still heavily sedated, and I can’t say I’m sorry to have missed it. After forty long hours the fever broke and my body temperature lowered beyond the normal range, leaving me a cool 92.7
    degrees.
    It wasn’t until I read over my medical files that I determined this was the first indication of my change. It baffled the doctors. One doctor noted such a thing wasn’t unheard of and cited evidence of low resting temperatures in coma patients. It was the equivalent of throwing his arms up in defeat, and it seemed to be the end of the matter as far as they were concerned.
    The second symptom was my incredible appetite. A nasal-gastric tube fed me without disturbing the repairs made to my throat. Still, every time the pharmaceutical fog lifted, I requested food. The nurses would frown and check their chart and then explain that while I received adequate nourishment through the tube, I missed the chewing and swallowing that accompanied the act of eating. And when the tube was removed, my voracious appetite didn’t show signs of decreasing. I ate astonishing amounts of food and, when I was sent home, smoked nearly a carton of cigarettes a day as though I’d been possessed by some nicotine-craving demon. Conventional wisdom held that smoking after major soft tissue repair was a bad idea, but conventional wisdom wouldn’t sate the maddening hunger. The masticating emptiness that plagued me was never satisfied. And the more I consumed, the wider the void became.
    The third sign didn’t become apparent until I had been discharged. After weeks of being immersed in the submarine-like interior of the hospital, I expected natural light to irritate me. But nothing could have prepared me for the searing pain that burned my skin when I stepped, blinking and disoriented, into the blazing white sunlight.

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    Though it was mid-December, I felt as if I’d been tossed into an oven. My fever might have returned, but I wasn’t about to spend another night in a hospital bed. I took a cab home, shut the blinds and obsessively checked