The Linus Project: A Short Story

The narrator explains that the nurse ties an elastic band tightly around her arm and presses her thumb against her flesh. She moves the elastic to the right arm and repeats the procedure, finding a vein. The nurse rubs alcohol on the narrator's arm with a cotton swab. The coolness disappears as the liquid evaporates. She takes the needle to the skin and extracts a sample, which to her seemed like a very large sample. As she mentions, It appeared in a flow all of a sudden, collecting and spilling over as she watched her blood being extracted from her body into the needle. While the nurse was extracting blood the narrator tells that she heard swans in, but it is not certain to say if it is true. Through this section we are shown poems both in French and in English which once again relate to her feeling out of place. The narrator feels out of place at this point not only because she’s not fully conscious of what’s going on but also because by having her blood drawn she now feels like her body is empty. She explains how in this process she was more fully aware of her inner body parts such as the tongue, mouth, throat and lungs and she described them as being assembled as one organ. She does not want them to be in one organ so she proceeds to bite her tongue as hard as she can till she knows that there is nothing

I woke up startled and didn’t know where I was. I had an IV in my arm and my parents were staring at me. The doctor came in

And then I seized with a fear that she looked like this because she was dead. She had died when I was having terrible thoughts about her. I had wished her out of my life, and she had acquiesced, floating out of her body to escape my terrible hatred. ‘Ma!’ I said sharply, ‘Ma!’ I whined, starting to cry. (180)

Sitting in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, 7-year-old me swung my feet back and forth under the generic, time-worn furniture and anxiously wrung my sweaty palms. I’d been to the doctor’s before, but with each returning yearly visit the dread that sunk to the bottom of my gut never shrunk. “Jillianne Carrasco?” The nurse called. My stomach turned. I began to shoot my mother a pleading look, but she wasted no time in grabbing my hand and leading me to the smiling nurse waiting at the door, and we both followed her through the pasty white halls to a customary exam room. The nurse closed the door behind us and asked me to take a seat on the crinkly tissue paper cot. She smiled warmly, likely taking note of my nervous breathing and shaky hands.

Next thing I remember was being in a hospital bed. I remember clear as day having to get an IV in me but they had problems trying to get the IV in because my veins “roll”. It was not pleasant having to be poked several times. If I remember right I was

As I’m wheeled through the silver doors into the sterile white operating room, I begin to panic. This is my first surgery, and I feel as if I am in a living nightmare. Before I can even think about it, the nurses guide me onto the skinny white operating room bed. A few seconds later, the blue-green anesthesia mask is put on my face, and I feel like I am going underwater with my eyes closed. Then everything around me goes completely black.

My supervisor, one of the head nurses, hurriedly pulled me to the corner of the bleach white hospital room and directed me to put on gloves, an eye mask, and a face mask. I felt as if I was preparing for war as I put on all of the required gear. The sound of expensive shoes click-clacked down the hallway indicating the arrival of two doctors who rushed into the room and shouted out orders to the staff while pulling the doors to the room shut along with the curtains. Two doctors, eight nurses, an intern, and a dying patient squeezed into the already claustrophobic ten by fifteen-foot room. The machine monitoring the patient’s vital signs continued to beep incessantly as my heart rate accelerated. Throughout my internship, I had never seen a patient in critical condition until that moment. I remembered my teacher’s advice if we were ever in a situation such as this: take a few deep breaths and sit down if you feel like you’re going to pass out. In that

I sat in the common area as the other patients colored and played cards. What they were doing didn’t really matter to me, I just wanted to be alone. I’d always feel like I was drowning, so it came to me as a surprise to me when the nurses told me that if I were breathing, I was winning. At night I’d lay on the blue plastic mattress and miss my room and everything it stood for. The blue lights that are strung along my bed, illuminate my nights. The pictures of the one I love line my walls, they are the barrier that protects me from the rest of the world. The blue plastic mattress draped in thin white sheets stood for the cold empty feeling I couldn’t get rid of. My nights were full of my thoughts bombarding my

I found myself in another room too small for the amount of people in it. The stale smell that clung to the latex of medical equipment offered a resurfacing of bitter inconclusive memories. White coats with clipboards shined lights in my eyes and prodded at my body. They rattled off the questions that had become all too familiar to me and I recited the same lines I have been for the past 13 years...

While I sat anxious. I had never been a fan of hospitals. Not to mention that I was exhausted and I was beginning to form a headache. I Couldn’thelp but to yawn.

I woke up in the hospital after two ambulance rides with a morphine drip in my arm and a team of doctors surrounding me. I had moved hospitals because a plastic surgeon

I woke up feeling like death. My bones were cracking as I started to stretch and my blood flow started to slow down. It was like I was amputated. I turned my body to the right, looking at my clock. As usual, my alarm didn’t wake me up. The white light poured in, even before I started to move and variety of intriguing sounds outside, all too in the early morning. Close by my bed was bottle of Peralta’s Best Booze, which was empty and an empty and small ash tray smelling like shit. I started to stroll to the bathroom; getting a clean face and feeling fresh. The rusty faucet started to leak.

The fog of anesthesia was slowly lifting, but I was still not back to reality. My stomach had been cut open, pummeled upon, then stapled, and taped shut. I felt exposed and vulnerable.

Imagine a small, dull colored room where the windows are closed off and inside lies a single medical bed with pointy silver objects surrounding it. The coldness of the room gives you chills but not because of the temperature. Even more chilling are the internal struggles a woman will have to fight through. Does she want to do this? No, she just feels like it is her only choice. She reluctantly enters the room where she will experience a moment that she will never be able to erase from her mind. For the rest of her life, she will be left wondering if she made the right choice. The doctor disrupts her internal questioning with a casual greeting. He does not smile when he introduces himself and she is glad about this because how twisted it would be to show any sign of joy in a place such as this. She

Nothing good ever happens in a waiting room. I pull up to the hospital with a subtle feeling of dread tugging in my heart, and the building looms above me like a grim castle atop a hill. I step to the doors and I am suddenly met with the familiar sterility that pervades every hospital. My footsteps seem to echo around these empty halls, and every sound is amplified, including the beat of my own unsteady heart. Truthfully, I already know where to go as I have done this many times, although I am not proud or happy to admit that. I walk through the winding hallways of the hospital as they lead me deeper into its heart. At last, I arrive at the cold, metallic doors that lead to the waiting room, and I place my hand on the metal as I prepare myself to walk in. After gathering my courage, I push the door open and I am hit with a scent that seems to escape my grasp even as I smell it.