Disclaimer: This has been written and posted by my friend due to my circumstances.
I started to lose my eyesight when I was 14, each year my prescription got stronger and stronger until I was practically blind without my glasses. It didnt stop me from doing most things, I still got through school, went to college, got the job I always wanted which was to be a teacher.
I lost my hearing when I was 27, turns out I have Usher Syndrome which had been in slow development. This caused me to also lose my job… No one wants a teacher who can’t hear anyone I guess. I moved back in with my parents and I did the odd jobs for them that they needed in order to feel useful and to make their generosity feel less like pity. Learned how to sign and how to read braille. Our family was small, just the three of us as our only relatives were distant both physically and emotionally. We didn’t have a lot of money and no health insurance so I couldn’t get anything to help me get my hearing back but my parents were trying their best to save up enough for me to get hearing aids someday.
I lost my parents at 29, they were on a train back from the city where they worked when it derailed as it was passing over a bridge. It left me with nothing. Their house was rented, they had enough savings to keep me in there for a few months once I had their funeral paid for. I had no one else, my condition had put me in a state of self pity over the last few years that I had pushed away any friends I had once had. Eventually I was living on the streets, begging for any food and sleeping in crudly made cardboard structures. I’ve been living like this for a year now.
My glasses broke last week.
People say that when you lose at least one of your senses another enhances. I had never experienced this up until now. But lying in my cardboard shelter in some long forgotten tunnel I had a lot of time to focus on what I could feel, as it was my only way to survive now. I had a few bottles of water, a few cans of food that I had been given by strangers so I wasn’t in immediate danger but I knew that I was in deep trouble in the long term. I learned to feel my way through the tunnel, finding the nearby park to relieve myself when I couldn’t wait any longer. I didn’t dare go further away, I wasn’t sure I would ever make it back again if I did. My whole world became about touch.
A few days later I was lay in my shelter when I felt a sharp cramp in my stomach that had me doubled over in pain. The previous night I had finished off a tin of what I think was jackfruit, but this place isn’t sanitary so God knows if it was the food or something else but bottom line was my insides were twisting in knots. I could feel the red hot pulsing of my intestines as they revolted against me. It was hours until it subsided and I’m embarrassed to say that I couldn’t make it out of my tunnel to the park.
But anyway, enough about my bathroom struggles, here is what I’m trying to tell you. That was the start of it all. When the pain subsided I felt my insides slowly relax to normal, fitting comfortably back into place amongst one another. My heart was steady again, my stomach produced the acid it had been forcing me to vomit up not one hour ago. My intestines eased and I could even feel them cooling down. It was this realisation that had me seizing right back up again but this time in terror.
I know your first thoughts might be something along the lines of ‘that doesn’t seem like such a big deal’, but can you take a moment to imagine what it must feel like? To feel everything 24/7. I can’t hear anymore but I can feel the blood being pumped through my body. I can feel where my organs touch one another. Where the roots of my teeth are sitting in my gums. Everytime I breathe and my lungs expand they push into the other organs nearby and I feel it everytime. I’ve stopped eating and drinking because I can’t stand the feeling of the digestive process. I can feel that part of the throat that opens and closes to consume something, I never even knew that existed until now! Then the hours of digestion which feels unending, I can feel my stomach breaking it all down and then it moving through my intestines to continue the process. I try to lay completely still so that I’m using as few muscles as possible as I can’t take the movement or the tearing.
It’s as if the more time that passes the more extreme it gets, the more I can feel. Yesterday I started to feel the hairs on my body slowly grow from their roots. But that seems like nothing now… Did you know that the human body has tiny bugs inside and out? I do now. They are in my eyes, all over my skin, in my stomach… everywhere. I can feel them all crawling and I feel it all the time. My skin is alive with the march of a million insects.
I don’t know how much longer I can take this. A homeless friend of mine paid me a visit today and is writing this in hopes somebody out there can help me. I can’t wait much longer, I know I don’t have long left. My brain is changing, it’s not behaving like it should and I can feel that it’s sick. This condition is sending me mad.
Please help me.