Heavy.

Everything is heavy.

I try shifting left and right, but there's something sitting right on top of my chest, restricting my movement. I try saying something, but then I realize, I can't exactly open my mouth. I try taking in a breath, but then I notice something wedged past my lips and lodged down my throat.

What the hell is wrong with me?

I try opening my eyes, and nothing stops me there, at least. For a split second all I see is the plain white ceiling again, but then a fuzzy figure steps into view over me. It's a man, I think; he's tall, maybe as tall as my dad; his hair is like a...fluffy, curly, white-speckled souffle, and it connects to a woolly beard of matching colour. All that hair stands out on his brown skin. I see a nametag too, on his blindingly white coat, but he's still too fuzzy for me to make out the words.

"...Suzie..." he says. At least I think he actually said that. I'm not sure I really saw his lips move. "...Suzie Amana...to stay awake....remove the breathing tube..."

I'm trying to focus — my vision, hearing, feeling in my upper body — but bile is beginning to riot in my gut. What the hell is in my mouth?

Another figure over me. A barrage of strawberry-blonde curls streaked with pink dye, tied in a wild bun. Now I know, I'm in safe hands for sure.

"....just relax Suzie...will pull it out...gonna hold you still..." goes Nurse Jarvis' voice, in and out, gentle and soothing.

I have no clue what she's telling me, and all of a sudden, there's a hand clasping my shoulder and another stationing itself over my chest near my neck. Two more hands fly into my line of sight and hover over my face. They've taken hold of something, I can feel it, but I just can't see it.

Souffle-hair man is counting down, "...three, two, one-"

And then-uugghhh!

whatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuck

He's pulling it-no...he's prying it from my throat. Something long and abrasive. I can finally see some of it the more it becomes extracted from me. It's a tube, I think. What the fuck. The man keeps reeling it in. It feels endless. It feels like my esophagus is getting butchered by a cat's claws.

I want to scream.

I want to cry.

I want to fucking-

"There! Finally out. Finally, finally," calls Mr. Souffle. Hands withdraw from chest and shoulder, and I find I can move my mouth now.

I look over on my right at him while coughing out my guts; a clear image at last. The tube in his hands is like some plastic python all bent out of shape and covered in my saliva. And the nametag on his coat reads, 'Altair Fadel' in fine black letters.

"You're all right, Suzie. Just breath slow."

I drag my head to look on my left just in time to see Nurse Jarvis bringing me a paper cup, of water I presume. She brings it to my chin, tilts it slowly. I try to meet her halfway by lifting my head. It's not the simplest action in the world right now, but at least my head's not really heavy like the rest of me. But one sip of the h20, and my throat feels like it's being attacked again. I groan and lower my head away from the cup.

Nurse Jarvis frowns down at me. "I know your throat must be sore, Suzie, but you gotta drink as much as you can. You're body needs to rehydrate."

She leads the cup half an inch closer to my face, and despite my irritated throat, magically I'm ready to give it another go. The cold water slithers down my windpipe, but it does nothing but vex the burning pain in there.

"Do you feel any pain?"

This time, I did see souffle-hair-I mean...Doctor Fadel's, lips move. His voice is the male equivalent to Nurse Jarvis, subduing and benign.

I want to yell in his face that my throat is trying assassinate me from the inside out, but he's not even making eye-contact with me. I heave my head just a little further upwards, and glimpse what he's focused on. He's fussing with something on my chest, something stubby and cylindrical. There's some kind of fluid inside of it too, all puss yellow-ish with faint traces of red, and cloudy. Nausea's jabbing me in the gut.

"Suzie?"

My eyes spring open (when I even closed them, I'm not sure) and I lock them with the doctor, who's looking at me instead of that weird, disgusting device in his hands.

"Do you feel any pain?" he asks a second time.

My eyes dart all over the place before settling on him again. "W-where?"

"Around the chest area." He slowly sets the device down somewhere out of my sight, and that's when I feel a light tug on my abdomen.

I squirm with all the sparse energy I have and attempt a small inhale. "U-umm...it's...uncomfortable. And I f-feel...heavy."

"But no pain," he concludes.

I can't help but blink at him hysterically. "S-should I be feeling pain? How come I'm n-not?"

"We've given you some morphine already, so it's a good sign that you're not in pain now. And it's perfectly normal that your body's feeling a bit strange. It'll pass with time." Doctor Fadel comes closer and looks me straight in the eye as he says this, and I can tell from the look alone what he's asking me to do, despite not saying it out loud: stay calm.

I think I'm starting to see what everybody loves about this guy.

"D-didn't I just wake up though?" I ask. "H-how did you give it to me?"

"We used an IV for easier distribution," Nurse Jarvis tells me, nodding to the thin tube lodged in the back of my hand. My eyes linger on her orange polka-dotted chest pocket of her black scrub polo shirt. There's some kind of wet stain over it. Maybe water. Hopefully water.

"Ooh..." I reply through my haggard voice, glad I wasn't conscious for the IV going in. I try wiggling myself a bit more, because in spite of the heaviness I'm just curious at this point, and there's definitely something still tugging at tummy. "What is that...on my stomach?"

Doctor Fadel lifts the odd, thick, cylinder again, making sure I have good view of it. "It's a hemovac drain. There's a lot of excess fluid and blood leftover in your chest area from the operation, so to get rid of it we use this. They're tubes connected from this machine to your upper-abdomen to do just that-"

"Connected?" I screech, or attempt to. "Like, they're inside me?"

My eyes go wide, and then suddenly I'm hauling myself up with everything I've got. Or trying to. Some perturbed sensation shoots through my chest as it bends a little bit; not quite pain, but not quite tolerable either. A slight cough escapes me, and tears puddle in my eye sockets. Some hair from my unhinged afro gets in my eye too, but I have to ignore it.

I'm beginning to realize not even halfway through my reckless act, that I might not make it to sit up on my own, but I'm saved of experiencing the agonizing outcome that would've come from crashing back down on my back.

A pair of hands on either side of me catch me just in time, securing my back and shoulder blades as I scoot upwards in the bed at my own leisurely pace.

"Be calm, Suzie. Don't move too fast right now," Nurse Jarvis instructs on my left.

I'm partially listening to her. My gown's open to the front so I can see my stomach and chest clearly. A small area just below my breasts, there they were: two thick tubes, seemingly wedged into the beefy skin and extending past it, the ends that led into my stomach covered tightly with white gauze.

My right hand moves with sluggish effort towards the tubes and I flinch when I finally poke one of them and feel it's disturbing shift against my skin.

"...what the fuck..." I apparently say out loud, because Nurse Jarvis' animated green eyes are fluttering before my own eyes, filled with a mix of worry and reassurance. "W-where am I though?" I ask before she can get a comforting word out.

"The ICU," Doctor Fadel answers.

I wince when I try to turn my stiff neck, and instead settle for craning my entire body left to right as slowly as possible. A spacious yet crowded room filled with white walls and occupied hospital beds and noisy machines that were also obnoxiously white.

"What t-time is it?" I stutter out when I realize my eyes are still searching for some kind of window to see outside. I'm being guided back down, my head lowering to the pillow behind me. Part of me wants to protest, but a bigger part of me's glad I'm returning to a horizontal position.

"Should be six by now," Nurse Jarvis says as she tends to the ECG electrodes and pulse oximeter attached to me, making sure everything's still connected properly.

"Six..." I echo. "...p.m.?" My senses are tuning themselves, completely unclogging at last. Though there's something about me that's still so...heavy. Something I can't quite pinpoint on where that's exactly happening inside of me, but it doesn't matter right now.

What matters is...

"It's s-still Wednesday? The surgery...I-it's done? I'm not...d-dead?"

"You're very much alive, Suzie."

I gaze up to my right at Doctor Fadel, and he's already staring down at me. He's got a stethoscope coiled around his neck now and a sphygmomanometer he's unwrapping in his hands.

He says I'm 'alive', yet I don't feel my usual irritation of having fingers pressed against my abdomen while I breath in and out, or having that torture device strangling my arm for however long it does to inspect my blood pressure.

All I feel, is heavy.

"You survived the worst," Doctor Fadel continues, and he's doing that thing again where he talks with his eyes: it's okay. You really are alive. Somehow I understand him. "Now, your life can truly begin."