♫ journal 9/28/2025

Doc

--from sometime in late winter, 2025–

Doc woke up the next morning 30 minutes before his alarm. In his head he calculated that he had gotten about seven and a half hour of sleep, and he thought to himself that he felt surprisingly well rested. He layed in bed, though, until the 5:30 alarm went off. He was half thinking and half sleeping, but in the nice comfy way, because he was surprisingly well rested. Then, at 5:30 when the alarm went off, Doc got up and went to the bathroom, and brushed his teeth, and put on his uniform, and then he left his room and stepped out into the hallway. And it was then that Doc remembered. He felt like shit. And he had been for some time now. To start with, his stomach hurt badly, and at this point he could no longer tell if it was from hunger or anxiety, so he presumed it was both. This stomach wasn’t unfamiliar to him– he was used to feeling nauseous during the times he was most anxious. But that was also usually around other people, and this new stomachache was constant and felt like his body was sending him a message, saying

“we, the intestines and the stomach, are fine– times are tough, but we will pull through. Just please, for the love of god, don’t try to make us process any food. That would surely be the end”

And Doc didn’t really know what to say to his intestines and stomach in response. It was like trying to get a stray dog to eat. But the lack of food was really starting to show– shakiness, cramps, constipation, general panic… Just yesterday Doc came home from work and immediately vomited. He really wasn’t quite sure what as going on. But he would be patient with his stomach– because panicking only made it worse, and because he still hoped this would stop eventually.

At work Doc sat at his bench, watching the jugs of stain gurgling as the automatic stainer flushed its tubing. Doc genuinely liked being at work. In the background the pneumatics and springs of the chemistry analyzer were making a faint repetitive sound, and the phlebotomists sat just around the corner chatting about things that weren’t serious or boring, the type of conversation it was nice to half-listen to. And on top of that it was almost break time, which meant this was the perfect opportunity to think.

Today, Doc was thinking about what if he lived in the hospital… Not as a patient but as a sort of stowaway. He figured he could find an upstairs room not in use easily enough, but the inpatient census had been record-breaking high the past few weeks, so there would always be the fear of the room going into use. But then again there were always closets and storerooms and that sort of thing.