From the author: Being sick is not healthy. It's painful, offensive, inconvenient. It's helpless, irritable. This requires a lot of effort, it is taxing on the body, it costs money, it ruins plans, and puts the whole family on alert. And yet, one day we find ourselves here - sick and in the hospital. A year passed before I could return to this article. I started writing it in the hospital. Trying to collect my thoughts, I wanted to find answers to the most important questions for myself: “Why am I here? What life tragedy am I losing now?” It seemed to me that my future life depended on finding these answers - whether I would get sick further and more seriously or stop there. I wanted to stop. My body was showing strange symptoms, I was scared. The symptoms were similar to the manifestation of fatal diseases, my body was changing, I was even more scared. One hospital was replaced by another, the staff of specialists involved expanded, and the stack of my research no longer fit in the plastic bag that I carried to each doctor. My head was spinning. The feeling that my body had gone crazy did not leave me. Suspicions of terrible illnesses were not confirmed. I am grateful to my psychotherapist, who was with me all this time. She didn't let me escape into illness. I didn’t miss a single session; I came to one of them straight from the hospital - angry, exhausted, confused. The symptoms did not become a disease. The vector of my movement towards “getting sick and maybe even dying from the disease” has stopped. At some important moment, I made a choice - to live. I am very grateful to myself for this choice. I returned to this article when my mother got sick. I saw once again how illness helps you organize your life so that you can get something that is very difficult to get in an ordinary “sick” life. Illness is an infant’s paradise. Being sick is not healthy. It's painful, offensive, inconvenient. It's helpless, irritable. This requires a lot of effort, it is taxing on the body, it costs money, it ruins plans, and puts the whole family on alert. And yet, one day we find ourselves here - sick and in the hospital. Throughout my illness, I had the feeling that there was some kind of wild underground plan that I don’t know about, but some other, childish part knows very well my personality, which creates all this chaos, leading me through the horrors of the hospital in order to get something of my own, very necessary and so necessary that even a fatal illness is a small price to pay for it. The personality leads the body, and not vice versa. But in what way -at that moment it seems that the body is simply mocking an intelligent, conscious person. As an individual, I have my own plans, and I know for sure that they do not include the hospital. I fight to the last. I work when I already feel bad. I try to solve all problems myself. I’m trying to stand my ground - “all this is nonsense, I can’t be admitted to the hospital.” I know what I want! But one day I am so frightened by the symptoms of the disease that I decide to go to the hospital. The hospital is a completely different world, a parallel reality, a looking glass. At least here, at least the hospital I was in. Painted concrete steps, peeling walls, beat-up handrails with peeling paint. And the smell... the smell of hopelessness, poverty and despair. But in all this there is a glimmer of hope that all this is not forever, that somewhere there is a world where there is no terrible pain, where it smells good, where people have an ordinary life of their own. Narrow hospital corridors; the frightened, embittered and at the same time wary and indifferent faces of nurses and doctors. Daily, routine work. Indifference and wariness are two emotions through which it is not clear how to break through. If indifference goes away, wariness appears. When wariness is released, indifference, aloofness and formalism appear. I am familiar with hospitals. As a child, I spent a month in the hospital every year. I remember these walls, these peeling concrete steps. My memory replaces narrow corridorswide, plastic doors - high wooden ones, painted with a thick layer of white paint, with windows at the top. The nurse's station was on the right, not the left, and the enema station was at the other end of the hallway. Yes, I remember this place. So why am I here? Why did I return here after thirty years? What am I looking for here? My childhood experiences. I, driven by the childish part of my soul, came here to meet and experience. Again. Powerlessness. The disease is so frightening that it completely disorients. What's happening? What happened with me? What can I decide here and now? What is under my control and control? I can't control the symptoms, I can't control the pain, I have to completely trust the doctors. Once in the hospital, I again feel like a child who is not responsible for anything, who does not decide anything. I feel completely helpless. I have to completely trust the doctors. "Listen to what they say." But the more I listen to what they say and follow their recommendations unconditionally, the worse I feel. I start to struggle and double-check. I'm not ready to hand over my life to doctors. The absurdity of what is happening, when one diagnosis is replaced by another, not a single medicine helps, and I am getting worse and worse, makes me think that medications alone cannot do it. I need to figure out what’s happening to me. The helplessness and power of a sick child. My family is alarmed around me. I need special food, my mother feeds me diet dishes, steamed. Every day everyone calls and asks about my health. They have long, intimate conversations, as if only from the hospital they can talk about the most important things - and who knows, maybe this is our last opportunity to talk? The necessary things are brought upon request - who would dare refuse a seriously ill loved one? They support with money, providing financial support. I feel protected, cared for and very important. Everyone loves me and is busy with me. Compared to my Illness, everything else is unimportant. “The main thing for me is to get Ira back on his feet,” says his mother. Somewhere deep down I know for sure that I am on my feet. But God, how nice it is to be the center of the universe. “I will always be with you!” Activation of deep defenses. As a child, I had a friend who survived all my hospitals. It was a big, long red fox. She was a part of my world, a piece of my home and home life and protection from all external adversities. You could bury your nose in it, hug it tightly, calm down and fall asleep. Psychologists would call this toy a “transitional object.” That important and valuable thing that replaces mother’s warmth and gives mother’s protection when mother is not around. One night I had another allergic reaction to medications - my face was swollen, covered with purple spots, a monster was looking at me from the mirror. I was very scared, but there was nothing to do but wait for the morning and the arrival of the doctors. Before this, during the day, along with the saucepans, a small terry towel, white with an orange stripe, turned out to be from my mother. That terrible night in the hospital, I hugged the terry cloth tightly to me and instantly fell asleep. My Fox is always with me. No matter what happens in my life and with me, I will always find support within myself. A friend’s shoulder. The hospital is a place similar to a children’s pioneer camp, only a little different. Only in the hospital can you put together your own “gang” - a group of girls, real, cheerful, strong, honest and frank, where each has their own difficult life story and their own strange and terrible illness. Thaw on the surface of existence. Long, long look at the top trees when a flock lands on them and takes off. See the squirrels jumping from top to top. It’s endless to watch the wind blow the clouds. Meet the first snow. Whatever you can do from your hospital bed. To experience again powerlessness and loneliness, horror and hope for salvation. Not sleeping at night, going out into a very long empty hospital corridor. Where there is no one. Everything is “somewhere”. In the meantime, it's dark and quiet here. And it’s very scary, painful and.