In the Belly of the Beast
Where were we? Right, waking up in a dark hospital room. As I said I knew where I was but not why. I didn't know that I had been there for more than a month. According to the records
I was there for sixty-eight days and let's go with that. The previous exactly thirty days had been spent - equally incognizant - in another hospital. Why they jettisoned me to this hellhole
I don't know but plauible deniability was probably a major reason.
This isn't the beginning - just the beginning of the part I remember. See, on 15 December 2020 I had done what I had done on every other day for years. Rolled out of bed (literally as I had
a custom-built bed that allowed me to sleep just about a foot off the floor so I just rolled over and hit the floor face down) and did a hundred pushups. Stick a pin there - you'll see why it's
important later. I had been doing it for a year or more. I had worked up to it over a period of months and figured a hundred was about all I needed and often if time permitted I would do it
again later in the day.
I was probably - technically - thirty pounds overweight but I have a stocky build so even at that it barely showed and was probably more like twenty on an average person. I knew it was there and
tried to keep it under control, breakfast of whole oats with no additives (sugar, butter, whatever) and the closest thing to fresh orange juice you can buy in a store. A cup of black coffee and off
to work. My office was upstairs and there was a stairs like a fire escape but enclosed at the back of the building. It was in two sections at ninety degrees and I would often leave the building that
way. I would stand on the landing of the top section and put my hands on the rails and jump and land at the bottom a little over six feet down, then repeat the process on the second section. Scared
the hell out of my colleagues who sometimes saw me do it but that's the kind of shape I was in on 15 December 2020. A few months later I was a cripple. Three years later I still am.
15 December 2020 was a month before my sixty-fifth birthday. I didn't know then that on my birthday I would be in an ambulance taking me to the jaws of the beast and an experience that would turn
a near-perfect specimen of humanity into a physical wreck.
Later - months later - I found the journal I had kept for years. The last entry indicates I left for work at 0730 and arrived at 0748.
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