I still remember my mother towards the end, laid up in that hospital bed, breathing the sterile air in sickening gasps, the cancer treatments having reduced her skin to an almost ubiquitous red rash. The only part of her that seemed untouched by it was her face. It was all that was still recognizable. The image of her like that never left me, no matter how hard I tried to stop it from overpowering the memories I had of her before the sickness truly took hold, but I just couldn’t. It’s as if her entire life amounted to those last few miserable moments before her body finally gave out.
My family has a history of skin conditions, mostly psoriasis and eczema, and as far as I knew there were few of us who were affected by it more severely than mild itchiness and dry skin. Nothing too unmanageable with some ointment and a good hygiene regiment. That’s what I thought, at least. Then, one morning as I was getting ready for work, I caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror and noticed a patch of pinkish-red discoloration on my lower back. Typical, I thought. I must have clawed at myself in my sleep again. It wasn’t necessarily an uncommon occurrence. The usual restraint I’d become so well practiced in during the day was pretty much rendered useless as an unconscious me scratched through my dreams. Hopping out of a shower and in a rush to leave, I sifted through the bathroom cabinet and choked down a couple antihistamines with a gulp of water from the tap before quickly getting dressed and heading outside to the car, the rash almost the furthest thing from my mind.
The itch began to hit me as I started off down the street, the blowers blasting heat at their max setting to combat the chilly winter weather outside. The heat built up fast, however, and within the space of a minute or two I could feel my skin crawl with that familiar uncomfortable urge to scratch at it. I unzipped my coat and turned the blowers off, trying my best to ignore it, but by the time I pulled up at work I could hardly stand it anymore. I allowed myself a single light rub, brushing at the rash with my fingertips and quivering a little as I did. Realizing that I was not only continuing to rub the rash but was also starting to incorporate my fingernails as well, I stopped, getting out of the car and minutely flapping the bottom of my coat for relief as I crossed the parking lot.
By the time I made it home, I was almost about ready to cry. In the mirror it was clear that the rash had grown along with that itching desire and I immediately started to run a bath as I stripped off my work clothes, my white shirt spotted with speckles of damp. The rash was already seeping. I had hardly even touched it. Immediately as my back met the surface of the milky bathwater loaded with enough oil to heal a leper, I experienced a burning unlike anything I’d ever felt. I all but leapt back onto the tiles, pulling the plug and frantically running the shower cold and thrusting myself beneath it. I doubt anything has ever felt quite so good to anyone before or ever will. I lost track of time, and when I eventually managed to lift my head up to face the clock on the wall I realized that it was coming up on midnight. I had been in the shower for almost five and a half hours. Trembling with the cold, I climbed into bed, my jaw rattling. For a brief moment or two as I warmed up, I forgot entirely about why I had spent so long in the shower and began to drift off to sleep. But then, the itch came back worse than ever. Tears forming in my eyes, I rummaged around inside the cabinet and found some sleeping pills. I took double the recommended dose plus another two antihistamines before spending the better part of an hour rubbing cream ever so tentatively across the surface of the weeping rash overtaking my lower back. Then, with little more than a modicum of satisfaction, I once again resigned myself to bed in the hope that a decent night’s sleep and the thickly applied cream might just be enough to fix me up.
I dreamt about my dad that night. My mother, too, in a way, but mostly just him. It was the first time I’d thought about him in a long while. It’s not so much that I dreamt about my mother, but rather I was seeing dad in her place, all limp and useless in that hospital bed. His skin, a deep crimson like an ICU burn victim and his fingertips bandaged into white red-flecked clumps so as to prevent any further aggravation. He looked up at me, and while he couldn’t seem to vocalize beyond those grating, desperate breaths, it was as if he was trying to tell me something. He was trying to tell me he was sorry. Before I could respond, I felt a presence lingering in the doorway, which I knew was now opened. A figure stood there, a black silhouette against the oblique contrasting darkness of the hospital corridor behind. It raised a beckoning hand, the room’s dim light dancing on the glistening surface of its necrotic fingers.
I awoke to a hell which I didn’t previously know existed. Raising my crusty fingers to my face, I was horrified by the dried blood caked beneath my nails, but not so much as when I sprang to my feet in pain only to see the bed sheets covered in gore just the same. The image the bathroom mirror presented was so hideous as to make me empty my stomach into the toilet bowl, the rash having enveloped my entire back and most of the front, creeping elsewhere on my body in thick scratch marks like the trails of viscious pioneers set out to conquer new land, leaving destruction in their wake. Blood was flowing out of chunks gouged from the skin like deep, flooded craters on the moon.
The cold water stung bad, but the agonizing sensation was drowned out by overwhelming pleasure as the water bit into me, although it wasn’t enough. Readying myself to run, I knew there was only one thing I could do to extinguish the pain blazing within my epidermis like a raging wildfire. I fumbled manically with the back door key as it struggled for purchase in the lock, and as it finally relented and the outside breeze cradled my putrid skin I bounded across the lawn, throwing myself into the deepest swathe of untouched snow I could find. A neighbor must have heard my cries as the icy ground numbed away my nerve endings and before long an ambulance showed up, the two paramedics struggling to get me inside as I screamed out for release which came in the form of a needle and subsequent darkness.
I have been in this hospital bed for less than two weeks, but I know that I won’t last much longer than that. Nor do I want to. The drugs are losing their potency, and the itch is growing stronger. It has taken all of me now, encasing my body up to the neck like some demonic jumpsuit fashioned by Satan himself. Every night when it’s at its worst I beg the doctors for them to end it all, but they refuse. My only comfort is the knowledge that it’s almost over. I can feel the rash inside me, invading my lungs, my heart. I can even feel it in my brain, corrupting the memories, covering them up from view, so all that remains is just dull, seeping red.