Medicine

Medicine

What if it’s not the illness? What if it’s the medicine these quacks keep prescribing me as the cure to their so-called illness?

What if it’s the medicine that’s causing me to vomit so much putrid, black, mucoidal blood? What if it’s the medicine that’s the cause of this scorched-earth asshole from these recurrent and violent expulsions?

I believe it’s blood because it smells metallic. But when I take it to the doctors for examination, they assure me everything’s okay. They assure me it’ll all turn out alright so long as I stick with their medicine.

But I can’t help but wonder, what if it’s the medicine that’s making me sick? What if it’s those doctors’ way of keeping me sick so I keep coming back to them for their expertise and assurances of medicinal salvation?

What if the ones who don’t take the medicine aren’t the cowards and reprobates my doctors tell me they are? Maybe those quacks are lying when they say it’s more noble to be sick than in constant good health. Maybe they’re lying when they tell me about the virtue of my sickness and suffering. Maybe it’s another form of quackery when they say I’m better for accepting my suffering than those cowards and immoralists who avoid it.

I suspect these things because I hear them whispering sometimes.

Once, when I asked about the medicine – if it was their elixirs and potions more than the illness that was keeping me sick – I heard one mutter to his colleague, “But, without his suffering, what else will he have?”

I’m sure I heard the other one say, “Nothing. Except for his hate of those we tell him suffer less. And, as we know, homeostasis requires a harmony and balance between suffering and hate.”

So here I am, every night, slumped or kneeling, voiding the bitter blackness through my mouth or anus. Accepting my suffering in a slumped or knelt agony. And hating the others too cowardly and morally repulsive to suffer with the sickness of their medicine like me.

But I’m finally beginning to believe it’s this medicine – not the prescribed illness – that’s making and keeping me so sick.