This one is a true story of what happened during Convergence 10. It is a descent to what happens when other stories on AuthorsDen come to life in a mind of horror writer during a hospital visit.
“We peer into the abyss -- we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. By slow degrees our sickness and dizziness and horror become merged in a cloud of unnamable feeling.”
It was May 1999 when I was discharged from the hospital with the diagnosis of manic depression. This past weekend on May 9, 2004, never thought I would go back to the hospital for a scare that would become the wake up call. It wouldn’t cross my mind if this appears in a few other’s journals about the ambulance incident. I was scared beyond anything I was able to relate because I never really paid attention to my blood sugar. That I had became sick the first time I was in the Metro but this wasn’t as bad as the first time I was sick there. I thought December 22, 1995, was the day that comes to mind the first time I was in the Metro. I am going to be thankful for what they did for a long time, though the hospital wait was one that reminded me of a torture chamber. Though when I was sick the first time in the Caberet Metro I could not remember why I was ill –– but I knew I had a high fever and felt that I wanted to collapse. Though it was in a sense of what I can word to this of what happened in the hospital – seconds ticked as days and hours; into weeks. That one had to help the hand trembler to his feet and take him into the ambulance. From this who is the question that the identity of the hand trembler, the one who writes this is the one referred to as such. It is always when I went to hospital that I found myself having the tremble in the hands. When I knew I had the trembling in the hands something was wrong with my health –– either it was a physically health or mental, one cannot really say for certain. Though that would be the details written of the last night of Convergence in Chicago, though the details in the hospital would have the makings of a story that were either written in my horror short stories or stories that were written by Terry Vinson, Waiting Room, was what came to mind. The stories of vampires have some truth behind them –– the truth being that the real vampires work in the hospitals; though I know that hospitals are there to save lives though the horror stories are the ones that live within their walls. Though it was sort of like that when I was admitted into the E.R. The time was about 10 in the evening and I wasn’t discharged until about 3 A.M. The question of what goes on in the imagination of what happens to the doctors – either they are making rounds or making another torture chamber device from a Spanish burning times. It would be seen from the dreams as they are described within the sleep I had that was brief. Though I knew when I was asleep it brought me into a nightmare that was also set in a hospital – needles pointing out of my veins because they wanted to draw some blood for tests, though when I was dreaming I could not tell or explain how the doctors appeared in the dream. That each detail from the dream remains somewhat vague to the memory as they are there. Health scares were something I had grown prone to since I was on disability, but this was I have to call one of those that woke me up. Something about hospitals that scared me out of my wits but known it was a needed thing when someone is deathly ill –– though the stories that revolve around hospitals would be the echo of everything around the pages of Terry Vinson’s and Stephen King’s work; as it is within a waiting room and an emergency room during a weekend of a festival. The concern is something I will remember for years to come from the others who saw me escorted to the hospital. I had to be helped to my feet but I was able to walk, though it was a sense of horror that was in my mind because I didn’t know what was going to happen next. It was the suspense of waiting within the hospital that tore me apart. I didn’t even know what was going on and the waiting was the torture –– all that was waiting within my mind and the darkness that waited within me. The nights that wait after all –– when everyone else sleeps that I sat in the hospital waiting for the doctor to admit me and to find out was was really wrong with my body or mind. That I heard some of the other patrons before leaving for the hospital in my mind when I was dosing off. I knew some were really concerned especially I didn’t know how bad my body was responding because I wasn’t able to get to my meds. That when I got to the Metro my body was badly dehydrated and shown the signs of a variation of a diabetic shock but I wasn’t diabetic. I could vaguely remember what I dreamed but I knew it was haunting in the mind of what they were. Though the thing that it concerned and frightened the hell out of me the most having to be needles being placed into my skin. I had always hated needles especially when they have to stick an IV needle into my arm back in Sept 1999. Of all those old nightmares had their way of reappearing within the pages written by Vinson; while waiting in the ambulance to take me to Thorak Hospital. All I wanted to do when I was in the hospital was sleep, and it seems like that each time when I am in the hospital –– but that was the one of those times that everything from what I read of different hospital set horror stories played out inside my mind. And the nightmares of needles as they would impale my veins ––- I never had the fear of the needle but something about needle had always made me feel uncomfortable. That it would be the things that I saw on a Twilight Zone episode or The Outer Limits that played into the mind –– where everyone around them looks all distorted and the person they were working on looked normal. The questions of what rests in the mind of a person who suffers with this –– a silent illness that one cannot see the physical symptoms. The telling of what is inside of a bipolar’s mind is that of a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces they could never piece together. I didn’t know how long it was but the doctor managed to give me a check over – to make sure I wasn’t in bad shape. Though there were a lot of things in my mind going on during that time – all the stories written by Terry of the Waiting Room and the MRI story written by another on AuthorsDen was what played out in my mind as I waited in the room for the doctor. The memories of the MRI play into mind because of when I was in Iowa and in the hospital I had to go under an M.R.I. Though from the eyes in my mind when I started to dream, the details becoming from them –– as one cannot realize what was going on. My hands were trembling without end, more of the sense that I could not begin to relate. My back felt as it was against the wall with the health factors –– knowing that I haven’t eaten in 18 hours and haven’t slept since five in the afternoon on Saturday. I didn’t know that my body was slowly shutting down from exhaustion; though the fast thinking of the security kept me from going into full mental shutdown. I kept hearing in my sleep, “Your blood sugar is low.” And with the family having Diabetes, it scares me to death. That horror coming to mind the word –– Diabetes. A horror that is more real than anything that is out there in the fiction pages –– conceived from a mind who writes either psychological horror or supernatural. Illness had always been a creation of horror that one cannot begin to fathom especially when one becomes dehydrated. As what I kept hearing the EMT say that they want to take me to the hospital, and I kept in the dreams about the details –– of the repeated impaling of the needles within my arms. As tired as I was – it felt like all the blood was drained from my body, as so it is described as such. That even as I tried to rest my eyes –– I felt my hands were still trembling, in the sense of the nightmares my hands remained trembling. It would be as such when I went to a conference in 2001, a few days after the event ended I was having to be in the hospital because I was without my meds. That each time when I have the dreams –– they would bring me back into the waiting room, that waiting room full of silence as one has the horrors in their mind to keep them company. Even from when I would fall asleep and what I see within the hospitals I try to keep from screaming as I woke up, horrors that stand within the mind as I try to speak. “Nick, we are going to have to call the ambulance for you,” one of the security guards said to me, “we cannot let you back in tonight because you will be a liability.” I agreed for them to call the ambulance. They said that early that night but it was about 3 in the morning when I was discharged from the hospital –– I managed to walk to the train station with a thought in my mind, “I am going to live. Holy shit, I am going to live. That is just a number of close calls that I had in my time –– another time in the hospital for me to relate later on.” It was on my way back to the Metro I did a lot of thinking, the needing to take better care of myself. The racing thoughts of what could of happened are what leave a picture of fright in the mind, that one cannot begin to describe the nature of their being – how many times that the man upstairs had kept me from completely shutting down. That in the eyes of one –– the world seen from my eyes, the nightmares as they are painted in the memory of the hand trembler. The thoughts of stories about vampire folklore, though it is only works of fiction –– but the horror stories around illness, especially of the mental; are the real thing. Horrors told for years to come –– the questions of why there was an ambulance in front of the Caberet Metro on the last day of Convergence, the answer of that question would remain in the man who is writing this narrative. Living within the nightmares of someone who suffers with an unseen illness –– where the signs are never in the open and telltale, when all that is written remains in the dreams of the hand trembler. All the things that play out in the hospital, all the nightmares run with my imagination. The things that are told among conventions about various horror stories that happened – this happened to a friend of mine two years ago in New Orleans, of her collapsing. Now it happened to me –– two years later.
Nick,
you are the man. This story actually scared me. I love your twisted mind and provides for good "edge of your seat" stories that simply aren't found in the dull and same old conventional market. Thanks for always being that aid to me. You truly inspire me.
Charles D. O'Connor III "In everything I am an outsider"-H.P. Lovecraft
P.s. The story "The painter" is now complete".
The fortunate inherit riches, prestige, positive notoriety. Those not so lucky bear legacies filled with poverty, infamy or, worse yet, the unhinged insanity and murderous urges of their ancestors.
Chris has been fostered at the Crowley boot camp since he turned seven. At sixteen, he is finally ready to run away because his foster father is an abusive person who works Chris and the other children to the point of exhaustion. All he has left of h
