BluE Scrubs

I took my baby for a ride today.

The weather was probably at it’s best considering only a few weeks ago a snowman in a back garden is not an unusual sight. It’d be lying to say that the weather was the main reason for spraying WD40 on the chain, wiping the seat, dusting the handle bar, and pumping the tyres again.

It was more because I felt an unsettling ooze of listlessness verging into a river anxiety. Have to be careful saying that because the latter might carry a rather morbid tune to what really was a mild, cool, bright and sunny day.

It didn’t actually take that long to get to the city centre. I past a few mini roundabouts made of flowerbeds. Gorgeous colours setting off one another with a few white ones balancing the brilliant bluebells and dazzling daffodils. Pink and purple. Red and green. Humble beige.

Somehow, it felt more like passing a valley of the dead. The colours seemed to have registered as light grey and grey and darker grey on my optic centre. Didn’t really feel the warmth of the colours. Couldn’t really smell the freshness let alone the fragrance of the petals.

Something in my mind was causing eddies of perpetual possibilities, doubting what I have tried so hard to believe. I swept these intrusive thoughts under the imaginary carpet. I said to myself. It will be ok.

I pedalled faster and faster up the hill. In my mind I remembered the time I was hit by a car off my pushbike coming home from a Paediatrics tutorial, 7 years ago. I was taken back up to the hospital, unconscious, blood pooled on the roadside.

The education secretary was one of the people who were stuck in the tailback and saw the incident as it happened. She said that the girl was limp, lifeless covered with blood. She thought the girl was dead but she hoped that she was wrong when she saw my blue Eastpak backpack I always had on me. I remember nothing.

When I actually came around, I felt tremendous pain in my right arm my face was sore and my bladder was bursting. My housemates were there, crying, some were saying sorry. They really thought I was dying. It was the strangest feeling ever.

The second day I was on the orthopaedic ward, I was dying to go home. I was dying inside too. The very person that mattered to me most didn’t even know that I was going through and ordeal. He wouldn’t have known.

The boys and girls from my year had to queue to see me. The well wishes pouring in, Professor Warner’s secretary, Linda brought a bouquet from everybody in the Paediatrics department. My bed was covered with flowers of all sorts and get well balloons. They had to get me another side cupboard to stand all the cards. I was very touched but funny enough I didn’t feel like it was necessary.

Maybe my brain was trying to protect me by tuning into an annoying amnesia, rendering all attention, cards, chocolates, balloons, flowers, unnecessary. I was grateful and I was touched, but not cheered up. Those flowers didn’t smell, the colours didn’t register. I prayed that it was all from him so I didn’t have to fake my smile.

It was a blessing in a way because it was at that very moment that I saw the whole picture. He couldn’t have possibly meant the word love.

I pedalled faster and faster trying to leave those thoughts behind as if it was chasing me, reminding me again and again. I was surprised that as I pedalled, I was feeling exactly the same as when I was sitting on the bed, looking like a female Frankeinstein, on ward F2 Southampton General Hospital, on a warmish May afternoon, rocking subtly back and forth while waiting for 1400 dose of morphine.

This is painful. He doesn’t love me. How blind was I.

Thinking.too.much.BluEScrubs