I left. I left without the discharge papers or without formally being discharged. I don’t know why I waited to hear the news when I already saw the look. The same look that they all give when they know there’s nothing they can do, or when they don’t want to try. I need surgery. They know I need surgery; finding someone who will come near me is the problem.

Even though I saw the look, I still waited. I waited to hear the news that I had been optimistic for nothing, and that I would leave exactly the way I came. The doctor never even bothered to come back into the room. “He hurried up and got out of that one,” I thought. Here I was four years into this illness, and you’d think I’d be used to this by now. However, I’m not. I break down every time, it’s as if it’s all still so new to me. I get reminded of how there’s no cure, and every doctor I try to see, if I can even get an appointment, just gives me the look and tries to refer or “suggest” me out.

I cried today. I’ve been crying a lot lately. I feel it’s the only thing left in my control. I can’t control my pain or my cure, so the only thing I can control are my tears. I hold them back. Then sometimes I let them go. I am back and forth and in between because it’s all the control that I have.

I just remembered, I’ve been here before. It dawned on me that this is exactly how I felt, even when I was in the midst of my addiction to pills. My pain came from a different place and for a different reason, yet the emotion behind it, the pain behind the pain, is still very much the same.

I wanted to be free, just as badly as I want it now. I recall how desperate I was to be saved, to be cured, to be healed. The pain then was all emotional, mental, and spiritual. My soul was aching, and my heart, I thought, was broken beyond repair. My God, how I can think about that pain just like it was yesterday. My pain now is mostly physical, yet it feels the same. I’m hopeful because the cure did find me then. It took some time, but it found me. Oh, cure, wherever you are, please find me again.