Chapter Text
Rin Matsuoka
A soft tap on my shoulder, followed by the usual scent of disinfectant, reawakens me from spacing out. It takes me a moment to realize where I am, what I’m doing and why my shoulder hurts so badly. I literally have to remind myself.
I’m with my friends, as usual, but for some reason I’m having a hard time paying attention to what they’re saying. Ever since I’ve completely stepped onto formulas and IV hydration instead of normal food, I’ve been feeling empty which causes me to just completely space out from time to time.
This is one of those times; when I’m in the atrium with my friends. We’re sitting in our normal spot, with our backs to the fish tank and our bodies curled up in between the pillows on the leather bench. And they’re talking, while sometimes shooting worried glances at one of the others to see if they’re alright.
It’s part of our daily routine, or when more than one of us are administered to the hospital at the same time. We’ll gather in the ground floor atrium with the five of us and just talk about different kinds of things, sometimes we even do more active things.
When Makoto’s hospitalized, we’ll have talks mostly about family, friends and home situations because he’s not only a heart- and kidney disease patient, he also suffers from severe homesickness. Whenever he’s here we all get a little piece of his urge to want to go home, because he tends to talk about his little siblings that now have to do their homework without him, and his parents who suddenly have no one to care for or to help them with chores.
Makoto takes care of the needed crying sessions, but is also quick to cheer all of us up again.
Makoto’s boyfriend, Haruka, is not at all talkative. As a complete mute he’s more of an active doer. Even though he’s in a wheelchair and almost unable to keep balanced at all, he makes sure we will have our daily exercise by dragging us to the hospital’s gym, pool or courtyard so we can move our fragile bodies and he doesn’t have to deal with our sappy, and often repetitive, life stories that exist of hospital visits, medication and depressive family members that would rather keep us home at all time.
Honestly, I like both of them a lot, crying is one of the things I seem to be good at and I have no problem doing while at the same time I’m closer to Haru since he keeps us from having our daily depressive periods.
Yet, even though Haru’s here, we’re still having our bench sitting session at the atrium today. Which is mostly because I’ve been experiencing extreme muscle pain and lots of joint dislocations today which makes me more likely to choose talking over exercising.
I haven’t talked too much yet, though.
I look to my side to see who dared to tap my on my painful shoulder and see Rei shooting me a worried glance. He mouths “are you okay” before lowering his hand.
He’s one year younger than Makoto, Haru and me, but he’s also the one that worries about everyone the most. Caring more for others that are sick, like him, than for himself despite dealing with CF day in, day out.
I nod in response to his question, I am alright. At least I’m not doing worse than most of my bad days, so I force a smile to show my anxious friend how alright I am.
After doing that I turn back to the others, who are having a conversation about… dreams?
I almost snort when I see Nagisa jumping up on the table, his arms waving in the air dramatically like he’s doing some form of a party game.
“And there was this huuuuge rainbow!” he yells, making Rei wince at the sound.
Nagisa ignores Rei’s headache, which he’s been complaining about all morning, and continues explaining how his dream about rainbows and penguins was visualized.
He uses simple words, a high-pitched voice and dramatic gestures, like a kid, even though he used to be a normal teenager before having to deal with a brain tumor from the age of fourteen. I’ve never known him the way his parents and older siblings knew him, but we all notice that the way of dealing, with a life changing form of cancer, that Nagisa uses isn’t the usual way of coping.
Still we all don’t mind Nagisa acting a little more childish than the other sixteen-year-olds in our group, because he’s really the one that keeps up optimistic. He’s the one that comes up with games to play and conversations to hold while completely ignoring the fact that we’re all sick, some of us even disabled.
Even though being Nagisa’s best friend, and clearly secretly in love with him, Rei has most trouble with Nagisa’s childish behavior. While every one of us deals with Nagisa properly, I can sometimes see Rei glancing at his best friend sadly when he thinks no one notices. And he’s doing it now, while Nagisa’s being scolded for standing on a glass table with his bare feet, leaving greasy footprints where usually other people’s food lays.
“Please, get down from the coffee table, Hazuki,” Miss Tanaka, the young receptionist that tends to keep an eye on us when we’re chilling down here, yells from her seat.
Luckily for her, Nagisa seems to be in a good mood today and doesn’t go in against her wishes for once. Usually he’d tell her not to worry or just ignores her until she has to get up to drag him away for punishment.
When Nagisa’s flopped back onto the couch, his head leaning on Rei’s lap for comfort, Miss Tanaka mumbles, “Jeez, that kid’s going to hurt himself some day” to herself without thinking we’d hear it.
I chuckle when Nagisa replies to Miss Tanaka’s statement by yelling, “That’s why we’re in a hospital, huh!”
Miss Tanaka takes her hand through her hair while rolling her eyes in a way that screams “I don’t get paid enough for this job” in a million different ways.
While we’re snickering because of the young receptionist’s massive eye roll, we’re suddenly interrupted by a deafening scream. It last long and gets hoarse for a while before sounding clear again.
My eyes grow bigger when I see the double doors open with a lot of haste. A couple of nurses run beside a stretcher.
“He’s still breathing,” one of the nurses explains when an unknowing other joins her. “His shoulder joint dislocated while he was swimming. I’m sure he inhaled quite a lot of water.”
We watch from a distance while the nurses rush him towards the closest emergency room.
This all sounds too familiar, and when I turn around to the rest I see they all seem to be having flashbacks to when they were brought in with an ambulance for the first time; Haru seems to have them more than the rest of us, as this is a similar situation to his.
I, too, am reminded of my first time.
I was just four years old and I was playing with some kids in my local playground when suddenly my ankle completely dislocated. I don’t remember anything from my life as a four year old, except from that excruciating pain followed by an anxious month of wearing a brace around my ankle and being unable to walk without pain.
It wasn’t the last time I was rushed to the hospital, and it sure as hell wasn’t the last time I wore braces to keep my joints from dislocating.
As usually the shock of seeing someone new being brought in wears off quickly and a new conversation starts. Still, a massive case of brain fog keeps me from paying attention to anything of the conversation and even if I were to do that, the scream of that new guy completely has taken over my mind.
I could hear the pain, the cry for help, the overtaking urge to want to time travel to a timeline where you aren’t sick or where your joint doesn’t dislocate with every move you make whenever you’re not wearing braces. I sounded like that.
Without thinking, I shoot up from my seat on the couch. I must’ve caused something to move despite the braces, because I feel an extreme pain burning in my knee.
“Where are you going?” Makoto asks when he notices me limping away from our hangout spot without saying goodbye.
Suddenly all eyes are turned to me and I suddenly realize that I’ve never walked away from our daily hangouts early if I didn’t have a surgery or therapy session planned.
“Can’t focus,” I say. “I think I might have a fever or something, maybe it’s better if I lay in bed instead of sitting here until I reach my limit.”
It’s a lie that could be very true, while normally I wouldn’t explain it as fully as I did now. Luckily they don’t question it and I’m able to leave the pointless conversation without any trouble.
I stroll through the atrium, dodging every inexperienced patient that’s gazing at the decoration of the small Iwatobi Hospital’s atrium. Everyone always seems surprised because of the glass decorations, wooden walls and massive amount of plants.
In the atrium, it doesn’t look like a small village hospital at all, it looks like a shopping mall with its big, glass cylinder incasing the stairs that circle to the second floor, and its giant fish tank surrounded by couches.
That’s why we like to sit downstairs rather than rotting away in our rooms; which are completely hospital-like with their white walls and light gray flooring.
I get into the elevator instead of taking the stairs, because walking the stairs is something I can’t do and have never been able to learn fully.
I step in the elevator together with a young woman that I recognize when I look at her a little closer. She’s wearing big earrings, and small ones too a little higher on her earlobe, her hair is falling over her shoulders and dip dyed with the darkest purple I’ve ever seen and her round belly tells me she’s even more pregnant than last time I saw her.
“Nurse Shimizu.” I greet her with a short nod, instead of the deep polite bows that hurt when I do them. “So, how much longer until the baby will be born?”
Nurse Shimizu, the young nurse from the children Oncology department, has gotten pregnant a few months ago and I bet you if Nagisa were here in the elevator with me he’d be all over her to feel the baby; he adores the twenty-five year old nurse more than anyone else, and it’s clear he misses her now that she works much less due to her pregnancy.
“Only fifteen weeks to go,” she says with a bright smile.
I feel myself smiling lightly too while I watch Nurse Shimizu gladly stroking her, already so, enormous belly. Sometimes I’m sad I was too young to remember mom being pregnant of my sister, Gou, because I wish I could remember lying on mom’s lap to feel my baby sister kicking to show us a sign of life.
“And what about you?” Nurse Shimizu asks, a slightly worried look on her face.
I frown, wanting to tell her that I’m not pregnant, but I know what she means not long after; she means how long this hospital stay will last.
“Another two, maybe even three, months,” I say. “Nurse Kato says it depends on how well the surgery will go and how quickly I’ll recover.”
She nods and kindly strokes my shoulder with empathy before we get out of the elevator and both walk towards our own destinations. She, probably, goes to the part of the hospital where they check on your baby and such, while I head towards the Orthopedics Department where my humble bedroom is waiting for me.
I slide the door to room F107 open and take it in; the bed, the monitors and the big window with its, even bigger, windowsill that’s been filled with pillows I can lay on top of.
I’ve been “living” in the hospital from time to time, and for some reason it seems like they keep this room available for me at all time. I’ve only been in a different room overnight twice, both of which was when I laid on the Intensive Care.
I’ve been coming here from the age of four, when I was misdiagnosed with Scoliosis and joint problems, because they had no idea what I really had. This surely wasn’t the last time I got diagnosis, whether they were misdiagnosis or other diseases that had to do with my leading genetic disorder.
I’ve been in the hospital with, what they thought was, chronic migraines when I was six, grief soon after my dad passed away and when I was ten they told me I had anorexia as well as anxiety. None of this was true, and when soon after the “anorexia” experience turned out to be the first sign of the, now total, paralysis of my intestinal track, I was quickly diagnosed with the genetic disorder Ehlers Danlos Syndrome.
That’s when the past seven years of barely being home started and that’s also the time I started to get friendly with my all-time favorite nurse, Nurse Kato, who’s taken care of me mostly ever since I’ve diagnosed with EDS, Chronic Intestinal Pseudo-Obstruction, Asthma and an Immunodeficiency disorder.
It’s that new patient’s cry that stirred up all of those memories from my first time here, my first surgery, my first misdiagnosis and my first actual diagnosis. And it’s like I’m reliving why first thirteen years all over again.
I wander into the room, my room, and sit down on the windowsill straight away.
I’ve barely even sat down when there’s a knock on the wooden slide door, and not soon after it opens to reveal Nurse Kato standing in the doorway with a worried look on her face.
I immediately worry about the look on her face, thinking it might have something to do with the blood samples we took a while ago, but then her frown turns into a smile.
“Glad to see you’re here,” she says, before walking further into my room.
I install myself a little better, pressing myself against the soft pillows, while asking, “Where else would I be? The hospital isn’t that big, even if I wouldn’t be here you’d know where to find me, right?”
Nurse Kato nods, she knows all of my favorite spots and has always found me within seconds.
“So what did you need to talk about?” I ask, snuggling closer with my pillow, hoping and wishing she’s not going to say something bad.
“Well, a short while ago we brought in a new patient,” she says and my mind immediately flashes images of the guy that was being raced to the ER. “I don’t know if you know that or not, but anyway, he’s around your age and we think, after talking to his parents, that he might also have EDS.”
I feel my eyes getting bigger in surprise; EDS is mostly found in females, and other than that it’s already a pretty rare disease.
She pauses and glances away. “Of course we have to do some more tests, and getting the results will take a while…” She goes on about this rare happening, but I’m not even really listening to her anymore. All I can think about is wanting to meet this guy.
“We are wondering,” Nurse Kato continues. “whether you’d mind if we let the two of you share a room for the time he’s here?”
I nod, immediately without taking a moment to think. I want to and I am going to meet this person!