Memories crafted from jagged emotion craft a horrid inarticulate jarring jumble of this and that and I veer away. I was ill and I didn't want to be. I should be elsewhere. I should be in a sunlit wondrous happy place, the stuff of dreams for mony a boring day. I should be being applauded. It is the day I get my prize.

I sat up in bed suddenly

Eager to not be as ill as I felt

I looked at the doctor who said I could not go

She looked at me

She listened to my really rather fine techniques of persuasion, my passionate soliloquy and she completely ignored everything I said

She declared me a Public Health Risk

I lay limp with shock

Everything I had ever felt left me. I don't know if you know the feeling. I wasn't me. I left me behind. That was me on the bed down there. That was me.

Where?

What?

Who?

People came and went, pleaded with the limp body.

I didn't reply, I wasn't there. The gulf that existed between me and my body scared me and could not be bridged. Rather alarmingly my body was wheeled out of the room and I felt as if I was chasing along behind it bobbing like a balloon on a string.

Endless sterile corridors.

Uncanny quiet.

Then a total absence of memory, of any feeling at all.

Into the dark came a horrid pummelling, then my mother's far distant voice telling me that I had been awarded 1st prize. Irrelevant. Blot her out. I was aware fleetingly that I wanted to die now this very minute but no idea why and I didn't anyway...

I didn't wake with a startle. I lay listening. I felt quite smothered underneath a fluffy goo of heavy comfortable sleep and it was a very very long way up to the surface but I was floating ridiculously irresistably up without any control or care. When the time came I opened my eyes knowing my mother was speaking to me. I was my ordinary self. Being my ordinary self made me concerned because my mother was not her ordinary self but a very frightened one. There was a nurse and a doctor and I was being examined closely. There was a thing tickling my toe. I kicked into my Best Obliging Self to reassure mum I was me alive and well.

Surreality popped back with the brutal thrusting of my certificate and cheque into my hands and smiling faces too soon for me to enjoy it. Exit that menagerie. I needed to concentrate on me. I felt very hungry (well 7 days without food) and ready to face the world and not a Public Health Risk at all. I ate toast and drank milk. It was 2 am. They let me out to rejoin the world a very short few hours later.

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