14
I wake and can’t move. I’m just twelve. My brother sleeps in his bed, his snoring rhythmic. I can’t call to him, can’t tell him I can’t breathe, can’t tell him I can’t move, can’t cry out to him that I need help. I am incapable of everything but the awareness that I am awake and paralyzed. Earlier in the evening, I watched a TV show that talked about sleep paralysis. They described just this, and said that the inability to breathe was due to a ghost, or entity, sitting on the victim’s chest, sucking the air out of their lungs. I don’t see anything. But the terror fills me…
13
I lay awake in my hospital bed after surgery, the priority right now that I have to prove that I can pee. The anesthetic can put the bladder to sleep apparently, and if it doesn’t rouse that means the insertion of a catheter. They fitted me with one during the initial surgery some eleven days earlier. I woke to find the catheter inserted you know where, and an external fixator fitted to my leg – that’s like scaffolding screwed directly into the bones to hold them in place while they wait for the swelling to go down so they can then perform the actual surgery. I wore the catheter for…