Comir-Not-today

I like to dabble in the occasional line or five of molly in nightclub bathrooms because it makes me feel alive. I also like to puff, puff, pass joints rolled by a stranger at parties and I have no clue if its home-grown originals, or bought from dodgy dealers who laced it with bath salts.

I live adventurously but I draw the line at this suspicious vaccine. Comirnaty. I can’t even pronounce it, but I know I don’t want it in me. It sounds like a god damn communist conspiracy. I know for a fact that the communists and the pharmaceutical companies are plotting mutually assured destruction of the planet, anything to screw over the Western allies.

The truth will all be revealed one day, I think to myself as I count the dots on the ceiling. I’ve counted them so many times and I still don’t know how many dots there are. Probably because I keep passing out. Stupid memory, stupid lungs not breathing properly. I’ve never been sick like this in my life, especially for something that sounds just like every other common cold. Stupid, stupid, body betraying me. What do you mean you can’t defend me that well because you’ve never encountered this virus before?

The click-click whoosh sound of the ventilator is my best friend and my best friend and I will keep counting dots, thank you very much. I’ve also been steadily ignoring the wailing 3-year-old and his father outside the ward. Someone died apparently but my god the crying and hollering has been non-stop for hours. Just shut up already.

The nurse comes in to see me and I ask her if she can do anything about the noise. She looks at me and behind the tired, sunken eyes, beneath the nights of overworked madness and laboring, and far beyond the fact that she hasn’t spent more than an hour of quality time with her own family in the last 3 weeks, she is still able to look at me with contempt. You know it’s not my fault I’m sick. I’m entitled to the public health care system, and access to healthcare is also a fundamental human right.

Oh, the wailing is because the child’s mother passed away. Her appendix ruptured and there weren’t enough beds in ICU. She was waiting too long and eventually died from septic shock. Couldn’t the hospital have done more? This woman also has the right to access healthcare so surely there was a way to save her? An appendix rupture isn’t exactly a novel medical crisis in our time.

Guess all the wailing makes sense. I’d be wailing too if I had the ability to breathe properly right now. The nurse notices a dawning realization on my face. There aren’t enough beds in ICU. Everyone around me in a bed right now is just like me, a COVID patient hooked to a ventilator. The nurse gives me one last look, notes down my vitals in her little book, and walks away without another word. Fuck.

Well look, modern medicine can’t save everyone and even where it can, sometimes you just miss out on accessing it in time. Also, you can choose what medicine goes into your body, and I chose to not get vaccinated. Yes, I’m in hospital now, but that’s okay because it was my choice. No one can take that away from me, and I shouldn’t have to feel guilty that I picked freedom of choice over “society’s general well-being”.

Bartering democratic rights for the health of the collective populous means eventual descent into a corrupted society. That’s the end of freedom. I refuse to accept that. No matter how many deaths, no matter how many ICU beds get taken up, I don’t have to take a vaccine if I don’t want to.

Let me just ring that help bell really quick though. I’m in severe pain and I need more painkillers.