Prescient Patient

For the tenth night in a row, I only managed to sleep for about an hour before perspiration and panic pulled me from the persistent dream tumult. As I gasped for breath, a lurid bolt of lightning immediately accompanied by a strident thunderclap shook my bedposts and divided the midnight for but a second before plunging my sparse bedroom back into utter blackness. I threw aside my dampened sheet into the oppressive shadows and cowered in the fetal position until my body stopped trembling.

The storm outside began to subside as I tried to recall the particulars of this night’s terror, but as usual, I only felt a nebulous impression of being choked or smothered. I wasn’t asleep for long enough to remember a storyline, but regardless, I picked up my dream diary and simply jotted down a single word: hanged. It matched some of the short subjects of the last week and a half: imprisoned in a dungeon, trapped in ice, stuck in a spider’s web, strangled, and drowned.

It was clear to me that these brief visions all implied a lack of control in the face of an overwhelming situation, and in light of my doctor’s preliminary prognosis they made perfect sense. However, numerous times in my past, I’ve had dreams that were so explicit that they needed no interpretation whatsoever. At age eleven, I predicted my older brother’s car crash. I warned him to wear his seatbelt, but he was too brash to pay my forecast any heed. After his death, my mother encouraged me to write down everything I dreamt; she didn’t blame me for my brother’s death; she called me a prophet. My father, however, wrote it off as a terrible coincidence. Later, the next Christmas, he began to see the reality of my gift when I told him that his brother, my uncle, would be captured by Al-Qaeda. I assured my father not to worry, as his brother’s imprisonment would end in under a year. Dad was never so overjoyed when my uncle paid us a visit the next Thanksgiving.

There were many other instances, but I shall relate only two more. When I was in high school, I advised my father not to fly, and when I retold the hellish nightmare of a plane crash, he permanently grounded himself. No doubt this resulted in his firing, as being a regional sales manager, air travel was a big part of the job, and after three months, when he couldn’t find alternate employment, he nearly fell off the wagon. Fortunately, I had a follow-up premonition. I told my dad to dedicate himself to our local church during his unemployment and to prepare himself to be the leader of people. Today he is the head pastor of that church and now both my parents call me a prophet.

I decided to get up and shower; I had an early appointment at the hospital. By the time I arrived, I’d downed an entire pot of coffee and was working on a twenty ounce bottle of Diet Mountain Dew. I wouldn’t normally have consumed so much caffeine, but this was one morning I really needed to stay alert. After my CT scan, I could come home and collapse.

I brushed the raindrops off my jacket shoulders and hung it on a coat rack before approaching the receptionist. There were four other patients in the lobby, and an orderly had just rolled out a man in a wheelchair and parked him at the end of a short row of chairs on the opposite wall. The man’s head and hands were wrapped in bandages; he was clearly a burn victim that had been brought down to the basement lab to determine the true extent of his injuries. His muffled moans were enough for me to see the depth of his pain.

After an unremarkable and expressionless check-in, I took a seat with the other unfortunates in the outdated and dingy waiting room. The flickering of the overhead ultraviolet lights amplified my anxiousness so I closed my eyes. I must have slept for quite a while, because when I awoke, the only patient besides me left in the lobby was the pitiful mummy. I crossed my arms and tried to ignore the burn victim’s laments, but finally couldn’t take it anymore. I called out to the receptionist, “When is somebody going to come and take this poor soul back to his room?”

There was no reply, so I got up to investigate. There was nobody sitting at the desk behind the Plexiglas shield; in fact, there was nobody in sight. ‘Strange,’ I thought, but as I returned to my seat I glanced over at my fellow afflicted and things got even stranger. Part of his face covering had come loose and about two or three feet of gauze was fluttering in the draft from the HVAC vent.

I got up and took it upon myself to help him, “Here my friend, let me fix that for you.”

I reached for the dangling dressing to restore it to its place, but as I did the bandage tightly wrapped itself around my wrist! I let out a shout, “What the…!” but before I could call out for further help, the mummy reached out a hand and his wrappings extended to encircle my head, blinding me and covering my mouth.

With all my strength I untangled my bound arm with my free hand and then used both hands to wrench the wrappings from my face. “My God…!” I gasped when I saw eight separate extensions of gauze undulating around the wheelchair like the possessed limbs of a giant spider. The closest door was the one that led into the lab, so I took it. As I slammed it shut behind me, several of the creature’s “arms” were pinched in the threshold, and it let out a shrill shriek. ‘Surely someone heard that,’ I guessed, but nobody came.

The tattered rags under the door were still writhing in an attempt to seize me, so I moved deeper into the laboratory looking for a nurse, or doctor, or anyone. Behind the door to the CT and MRI equipment room I witnessed a scene so horrific that I knew I had to be ensnared in the Land of Nod!

Inside the MRI tunnel was another mummified corpse, but its wrappings so completely encased the machinery itself that I could barely identify the body from which the twisted appendages spawned. On the floor, next to the apparatus, a nurse was enveloped in a cocoon of cotton, while a helpless lab technician sat tied in place to her chair. Only her mouth and one eye were visible through her coverings; her pupil was dilated in fright, and her crimson lips quivered in agony as she emitted a stifled rasp, “Pleeease…help meee…”

I told myself there was nothing I could do and ran. I swung wide the waiting room door and fled past the arachnoid mummy and into the hospital’s basement hall. The creature’s extremities extended in an attempt to grab ahold of my ankles, but adrenaline fueled my escape. I made it to the elevator, and slammed the call button, but to my disappointment when the door slid open it revealed another of the infected swaying from a surgical dressing noose that had snatched him up from the ceiling grate. The ghastly malady had probably spread through the entire building via the ventilation system. I had to get out!

I left the hanged man and sprinted down the marble floors of an empty hallway until I finally came to a door with a sign labelled, “In case of fire, use stairs.”

“No shit…!” I flung open the door and bolted up the winding stairway, but when I got to the first level I found a security guard holding the door to the main lobby shut.

“You can’t go that way! It’s like a net of webbing; you’d never make it to the exit!” The officer had a fireman’s axe in his hand and he swung it down hard, severing a chunk of gossamer mesh that had managed to squeeze its way through the door’s threshold.

“Well, there’s no way out below…so now what?” I panicked.

The guard looked at me and suggested courageously, “I’ll hold the door; you just get to the roof!”

With the gait of a gazelle I launched myself up the stairs, never once stopping to catch my breath. At various landings, mummy wraps could be seen wriggling themselves through gaps in the doors, but without pause I galloped. Just before reaching the apex, my right ankle was held firm and I tumbled face first onto the final landing. Blood drained from my nostrils to the corners of my mouth and I could taste my own salty fear. My restraints wound themselves up both my legs and around my torso, but my arms were still free. On my elbows, I dragged myself up to the metal door. With both arms I pushed with a Herculean effort on the emergency exit’s door brace and sprawled out onto the tar and gravel roof.

To my surprise, it had stopped raining, but to my adulation, the radiance of the sun wonderfully warmed my clammy and battered face. Even more wondrous was the fact that when the sun’s radiation touched my malevolent restraints they burst into smoke and ash. I stood up and raised my hands to the heavens, “I was free!”

I snorted; the dream was complete. I awoke to an empty waiting room; there were no other patients, not even the unlucky burn victim. I wiped some drool from the corner of my mouth as I heard my name read aloud by the same nurse that checked me in. I stood up and followed her into the lab for my CT with a noticeable grin.

“You looked pretty tired when you arrived, but that short nap must’ve done wonders for you. With a smile on your face, you look much healthier,” the nurse observed.

In the lab, another radiation specialist helped me get settled, but before performing my scan, she gave me some words of assurance, “I won’t be able to reveal any results today. The doctor will have to see them and his office will give you a call. Don’t you worry…no matter what the scan shows, we will help to make you better.”

“Thank you, but I’m not worried. The doctor is going to find the cancer, but I’ll beat it. I’m a prophet.”

She didn’t ask how I was so sure, but instead she just nodded and started the machine. The meaning of the vision I’d had was obvious to me. The hospital represented a body infected with cancer. The hospital hallways and ventilation system were its veins, arteries, and capillaries. The overrun lab was one of the body’s critical organs. The patients and hospital staff, including me, were normal cells, but the security guard was a white blood cell. When the healing rays of the sun, representing radiation therapy, hit the cancerous mummy rags, they were successfully and utterly destroyed. In the end, “I was, and will be, cancer free!”