She's gentle, professional, her face carefully neutral as she takes my blood pressure and temperature.
I wonder how many junkies she's seen lying in this exact bed, making the same promises I made.
I wonder how many of them actually kept those promises.
"How are you feeling?" she asks.
I want to laugh.
How am I feeling?
Like I'm dying.
Like my body is eating itself from the inside out.
Like every cell is crying out for something I can't give it.
"Fine," I say instead.
She doesn't believe me.
I can see it in her eyes.
But she doesn't push, just makes a note on her tablet and tells me she'll be back in an hour.
An hour.
I don't know how I'm going to survive an hour.
The clock on the wall ticks away the seconds with excruciating slowness.
Each minute feels like an eternity, stretched and distorted by the misery consuming my body.
I watch the second hand move and try to focus on just that—one second at a time.
One breath at a time.
I can do this. Ihaveto do this.
For Garrett.
For myself.
For whatever's left of the girl I used to be.
By the second day, I've stopped pretending I'm fine.
The vomiting starts sometime around midnight and doesn't stop.
My stomach heaves and convulses, expelling everything I've tried to eat, until there's nothing left but bile and dry heaves that wrack my entire body.
My muscles cramp and spasm, my legs kicking involuntarily, my arms jerking like a puppet whose strings are being cut one by one.
The medical staff is prepared for this.
They've seen it all before.
They hook me up to an IV to keep me hydrated, give me something for the nausea that barely touches it, and speak to me in calm, soothing voices that make me want to scream.
