The Most Dramatic Night of my Life

When I was in Armenia, I got sick. Like, SICK. So very, very sick. It was like I had been unknowingly accosted by some acid demon from hell. One that took up spiky residence in my stomach, and simultaneously shoved acid spears up my esophagus and down my intestines. And every time its acid spears would find some untouched bit of flesh, something not charred by its infernal torture, it would jump up, latch on, and slowly rip up the flesh. 

This is remotely what I picture:

Anyway, that's what was happening on the inside. And on the outside, I alternated three distinct states of being. 

1) Curled in a ball somewhere dark and secret, silently chewing on the inside of my mouth to try and distract my mind from the pain. I figured target confusion would work. I was wrong.

2) Expelling food and drink items from one of my orifices in randomly digested states

3) Traipsing around outside being angry at everyone and everything.

So after a few weeks of this, came The Night. The most DRAMATIC NIGHT OF MY LIFE. Yeah. I said it. And getting that status isn't something easy, let me tell you. I've had some DRAMA FILLED NIGHTS. But this...... this takes the proverbial cake.

Which cake is a whirling mass of bile and hatred. 

But anyway, let me tell you how it went.

After a long day spent in state #3, me and my current companion came home for the evening. We had a few things to do before we went to bed. This was my participation, roughly, in the evening's activities:

1) Call the district leader and tell him about our day. The conversation went something like this: "We raged around and taught people crap and Sister Smith didn't let me talk. Cool?" I'm exceptionally pleasant when ill. :)

2) Planned. I contributed little tidbits such as "why don't we change that one tiny detail you let me have control over, while all the really important decisions are made by you. Goody! You even want control over which snack I bring! Joy!"

3) Nightly prayers. I think I said something along the lines of "If you want to kill me tonight, that's cool. But let it be something where Sister Smith feels bad about it." Yeah, we didn't get along.

Then, I went to sleep. 

My dreams in Armenia were always haunted with happy things. I say haunted because I was so unhappy and ill, that happy seemed to taunt me. Like food does when you're hungry. Bah. Jerk brain, taunting me with happy memories.

I woke up at around 11:30, and proceeded to state #2. After about an hour of that, I proceeded to state #1. I collapsed like some sort of twitching, gray unicorn on the couch, and began tearing at it with my fingernails. I eventually rolled, as dramatically as possible, onto the floor, trying to make as loud a thump as possible. (I wanted Sister Smith to see me miserable, and to lose some sleep so she would be miserable too). I pulled all the couch cushions on top of me, and twitched in a pile for a while. It felt like a long time, but it could have been like 5 minutes. Who knows, really. 

This pain was so intense! It was like I had swallowed a stegosaurus, and as it struggled, its spiny back was tearing me up from the inside out. I was positive I was dying. 

Slowly, I became aware of a pathetic, almost frankenstein-ish moan coming from somewhere in the apartment. I remember feeling totally taken aback - how DARE she moan, when I am in so much pain! Then I realized.... I was the one moaning. And I continued to do so. Making my brain focus on making the moaning louder was distracting it from the pain. I've heard people say "searing pain"... but this was like a struggling, wet, acid pain. Something cold and dangerous. Like face planting into a pool of someone else's bile.

Eventually, she woke up. I think she was afraid - the sounds I was making were more like a partially butchered hippo, rather than a human. But when she came out, I think she was frozen by the sight. A mass of olive green, corduroy pillows, at the center of which was a sweaty, half-dressed mass of exhausted pain and fury. I was probably something straight from her nightmares.

We called the doctor assigned to us, who happened to live in Ukraine. Jerk doctor, living thousands of miles away, telling me to get to a hospital. You can't even see me, I thought. You don't know! At this point, I stopped feeling so tragic. My brain had been given a task: locate a medical facility! OF COURSE! Why didn't I think of that? 

We started gathering the things we thought were important for an emergency trip to a hospital in the semi-rural, isolated north of a third world country. Sister Smith thought of shoes, the cell phone, extra socks, and carby food items. As she logically filled her bag with the essentials, I decided a can of peas was absolutely necessary. Along with a bucket. And a slip. I'm useless in disaster situations.

We staggered outside and I remember being WAY too loud. Sister Smith kept trying to shush me and I was like "YOU DON'T KNOW ME! LEAVE ME ALONE!" I felt completely indignant towards her trying to help me walk to a taxi. We asked the driver to take us to a hivandanots - a hospital. He looked at me, and I think I was so moany and helpless by this point, he complied. 

We drove to a relatively nice part of town, to a building that reminded me of Dick Tracy. I don't know why. We went inside, and a few nurses poked and prodded me and stuck a thermometer into my armpit. They proceeded to tell me that I had "mrselled". Basically, that my feet had gotten too cold, so now I was sick. I immediately saw these nurses as uneducated enemies, and I started flailing and yelling 'Mrsel goiutiun chuni!" Over and over again. "Mrsel doesn't exist!" They decided I needed to go the surgery hospital. I wanted nothing more to do with them, and I think they wanted even less to do with me, so they stuffed me into the back of a white hearse, whose walls were coated with a thick layer of visible infection. Sister Smith tried to talk to the driver about the gospel. I hated her so much in that moment.

We drove up to a crumbling, stinking, cement edifice that seemed scream "COMMUNISM!!! I AM THE SOLUTION TO ALL OF SOCIETY'S PROBLEMS!!! LOOK HOW UNATTRACTIVE AND STURDY I AM!!!!" We went inside, and I was laid on a rough cement slab jutting out from the wall. There was one light in the whole building, it seemed. And it shined directly on the face of an older armenian woman with too much eyeliner and not enough skin. She ran to get the doctor. I saw a few glowing specks coming toward me in the dark. As soon as they stepped into the light, I thought of Beauty and the Beast. The moment where she seems him for the first time. (Skip to 1:10) (It's in cantonese, PS).

Terrified, speechless, horrified by these men who were so obviously not doctors, but claimed to be. Belle sees the beast as the mangy, shadowy, awful incarnation of what once a man.

And that's how I saw the doctors.

They poked me through my clothes, then tried to lift my shirt. I screamed and pulled it down. I would not be defiled by these pretend doctors. They would not examine me. I faced the wall and curled into a ball. I think I started to cry.

They told us to follow them to a room. 

We followed them up dark, sick smelling hallways and staircases, past the room that they called the "bathroom". Yup. There was only one. For the whole hospital. It reeked so profoundly of human waste old cigarettes, I got dizzy.

Around one more corner, down one more hallway. They asked us a question. I didn't understand.

"What?" I asked.

"They asked if we brought bedding."

I groaned. The "doctors" opened a door. The immediate smell of unwashed human flesh filled my nostrils. A room with 6 beds. Five of them already filled. 

I turned to Sister Smith. "Hell. No." I was almost whispering in my determination. If I entered that room, I would probably get the plague. And bedbugs and herpes. And ..... so many other things. 

After much protesting from me, we were taken down the hall, to talk to the hospital boss. That is his only title, considering that he was a fake doctor and probably a fake hospital director. 

I refused to let them touch me. Sister Smith said I was hurting their feelings. I told her I didn't care. I wasn't going to stay there. 

After a 3am phone call to the Mission President, I found myself in a taxi on my way to Yerevan, the capitol city. There was an actual hospital there with actual doctors. By this point, I was so stressed that I made myself worse. 

It was blizzarding outside. And every 10 minutes, I had to stop the taxi to relieve myself on the side of the road. One end or the other. It just kept coming out. My own bile seemed to mock me. No real vomit came up - just the thin lining of my stomach. It seemed to say "HAHA! You can't even keep your own fluids inside of you! SUCK ON THAT!"

After a few more episodes of this, we decided to make use of my bucket.

I wedged it behind the driver's seat, and passed blood and bile into it for the rest of that night. 3 hours in that taxi. Vomiting and excreting the only fluids left inside of me.

When we arrived a president's house, which was a veritable mansion wedged in between two other mansions, probably inhabited by mafia members, we got out of the car. I stumbled up to the door, rang it, and waited. When President opened the door, I stood straight up, moaned "President, can you kill me with your priesthood?" and fainted.