The doctor’s eyes say it all.

Not what I’d hoped. Not “I understand. Let’s form a treatment plan.”, but “Fuck I have no idea what this is!”.

Not the most comforting news when you’re strapped to a gurney and your body is doing whatever the Hell it likes.

Arms trying to break through forced barriers; head relocating from spine; leg turned as though it wanted to walk back to what we were, who we were, before we became a sequence of symptoms, became a medical mystery.

Three years later and I roll up my sleeve for Laura to take my blood pressure and I realise this could be it, forever. My whole life a series of becoming ill, getting well, feeling like happiness is in reach and then falling back down the rabbit hole to Wonderland.

My body shaking I can feel bones shifting and people shouting in the distance, I’m blinded, my eyes are in the back of my head but at least I can still see the truth.

I know the morphine must be in now because I am hallucinating; seeing a world where I could really cycle on a real bike and really go to school every real day. Where hours feel like hours and minutes feel like minutes. Where I could do any of many hundreds of jobs and raise children and have a family and be safe.

But three hours have passed, my family all but one gone, and there I lie on the gurney, slightly less modestly, entirely destroyed by the knowing that my real future will forever be an uncertain and terrifying place to look to, and that my ‘now’ is the only thing I can count on being true.