Her throat was dry from the medication.
Her mind was clouded by the painkillers.
Her lips felt stuck together.
Thoughts dissolved before they could form sentences.
Efforts to ask for help or clarify a need ended up being met with sympathetic glances and quick scribbles on a clipboard. The voices of family, medical staff, and strangers passing through the room arrived muffled, as if filtered through a soft cotton wall.
A world with its own rhythm.
Under the hospital’s artificial light, people’s figures transformed into precise shadows: the nurse’s hands changing the IV, the doctor’s firm footsteps in the corridor, the faces of those entering and leaving the room. They were all part of a universe that functioned to an external beat, marked by the constant beeps of the monitors and the almost imperceptible hum of the machines.
Closing my eyes, it was impossible to escape that rhythm. It beat alongside my heart, exhausted yet persistent. Each moment seemed to multiply: the same light, the same sounds, the same gestures repeated ad infinitum. The numbers on the clock lost their meaning, and all that remained was the feeling of being trapped between a painful yesterday and an uncertain tomorrow.
Pain and Painkillers: Two Forces in Tension.
Pain ruled those days, but not as a constant presence. It arrived in waves that struck from time to time, leaving behind a heavy, indescribable weariness. The painkillers, neither entirely mild nor entirely cruel, altered the intensity of the internal sensations.
Sometimes, a vivid fragment of memory would emerge clearly, only to vanish immediately under the effects of the drug-induced dizziness. Other times, the sensation was one of floating between states, trapped in the same moment endlessly repeated. Concrete objects—the antiseptic smell, the touch of hands checking vital signs—mingled with gaps in memory and with emotions difficult to define.
