A Fragment

The textured plaster walls of this dismal examination room are covered from floor to ceiling with a disorienting, otherworldly array of tattered posters, charts, and pamphlets. My eyes dance over the faded images and words, scanning the content without any clear sense of its purpose or intent. My little feet dangle nervously down from the edge of a sterile, paper-sheathed diagnostic table.
“Your body's a lemon,” she says, “just bad genetic luck.” At just barely eight years old, I have no concise notion of what this doctor intends by either “Genetic” or “Lemon.” Having asked my father to leave the room several minutes prior, she’s been questioning me about the details of my home life, in a vain attempt to arrive at some sort of reasonable explanation for my being, at this tender age, subject to such a seemingly recalcitrant, exhaustive list of inexplicable, chronic illnesses. Her questioning, though reasonably thorough, has offered no illumination on the topic — thus her defeatist statements regarding my genes. “You'll be like this forever,” she continues, shrugging “some people are just sick all the time.” I shrug, attempting to mirror her movements. “Do you know what ‘maintenance medication’ means?” I shake my head, timidly. “Well, we're going to need you to take more pills.” I nod, possessing no tangible basis with which to assess the implications of the statement.
I cannot, from my childhood point of reference, fathom the true ramifications of this conversation, nor the full extent of the long-term effects which it will inevitably have upon my physiological, psychological, and emotional constitution. Nearly all of the prescriptions which I’m taking, and will continue to take for years to come, are habit-forming. More perceptions mean more side-effects; more side-effects mean more perceptions. More physical illness means more emotional unrest; more emotional unrest means more physical illness. Thus flows an unending cycle of chemical addiction, physiological disease, and mental illness which, even at this early age, extends beyond the reach of tangible memory.
Here, at this pivotal time and place, it is all I’ve ever known.