There are moments when the past and present collide, leaving one grasping for reality. For Sam, this was one of those moments.
In the depths of his drug-induced haze, Sam blinked and squinted, struggling to decipher the distorted world beyond. He felt as if the autofocus feature of his eyes had malfunctioned. With deliberate effort, he manually adjusted his vision, slowly bringing the room into clearer focus.
He realized he wasn’t at home; this wasn’t London. The sterile walls, a jarring shade of lime, were decorated with unfamiliar hieroglyphics and seemed both strange and dated. A distant hum of unfamiliar conversations echoed, and the faint yet unmistakable scent of disinfectant filled the air.
Confusion clouded his mind as he tried to piece together how he had ended up here. He then noticed two women nearby. As his drowsiness faded, it became clear they were nurses. But only as his vision sharpened, he realized something else: these nurses were Thai.
And then, like a freight train roaring through his consciousness, memories slammed into him. The cacophony of a monstrous wave, the sheer power of nature’s wrath, the helpless feeling of being a mere speck in the face of devastation. He grappled with the nightmare that had seared itself into his psyche.
His breath quickened as he recalled the chaos on Koh Phi Phi island, the frantic search for friends lost in the chaos, the desperation as others ran to find higher ground as the tsunami crashed its relentless fury. But then, amidst the torment of those memories, a new realization clawed its way to the forefront of his mind: he wasn’t injured in the tsunami. He was part of the search and rescue, he made it out alive, unlike the thousands that died that day. No, this wasn’t the tsunami that had ravaged his past.
A jarring shift, like a needle skipping across a record, brought him to the next logical associated trauma. Waking up in Chiang Mai, Thailand, after a night marred by “trauma drinking.” The sight that greeted him was chilling: a pillow stained deeply with blood. His confusion escalated to horror when he caught sight of his battered reflection in the mirror. At that moment, he had no recollection of the severe motorbike accident he’d been in the previous night.
His heart sank as he processed the trigger of his spiral that night. The fourteen-hour nightmare at Fulham Police Station, where he was mocked and dismissed by police and doctors whilst losing his mind to flashbacks of the dead and dying. The fear and intensity of the events at Fulham trigger panic. He tries to calm his breathing, instructing himself “Please, breathe mate. You need to calm the fuck down!”.
As his mind calms and is transported from Fulham Police station to wherever he is in Thailand. It must be another motorbike crash. But the fragments of his memory did not seem to fit. The puzzle pieces remained scattered, refusing to form a coherent picture. After that crash, it was either alcohol or motorbikes. He didn’t trust himself so chose alcohol and never got on a motorbike again.
Then the entire world shattered, as the searing pain from within his body shot through his nerves, causing an explosion of synapse activity. As his body finally caught up with his racing brain, he felt pain, unlike anything he could recollect. Something isn’t right warned his consciousness.
It was then that he became aware he couldn’t move his body. Terror erupted within as he grappled with whether he was paralyzed. With an arduous effort, but with a tsunami of fear, he managed to focus his gaze downward, searching for the source of his pain. The sight was enough to shatter whatever semblance of reality he had been holding onto. His eyes widened, and a gasp escaped his lips, barely audible against the humming of machines.
A gnarled, jagged scar snaked its way down the entire length of his abdomen – a grotesque memento of an unknown trial he had endured. Fresh bandages, tinged with blood, shrouded the wound as if the medical team had attempted to conceal not only the physical pain but also the emotional turmoil lurking beneath.
The realization struck him with the force of a sledgehammer to the chest, squeezing the air from his lungs. It was a dread that went beyond the memories of the tsunami, beyond the trauma of living with trauma. It was a fear that lurked in the shadows, taunting him—a fear he had never experienced until this very moment.
“It’s worse,” his thoughts screamed at him, “worse than the tsunami, worse than the motorbike crash.” His heart raced, pounding in his ears as the words formed a bitter knot in his throat. “It’s cancer.” And there, in the sterile confines of that Thai hospital’s recovery ward, as the anesthesia slowly released its grip on his mind, Sam’s consciousness was shackled to the stark reality that he had just woken up after major cancer surgery.
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