--Breathless by Jessica Warman
“It’s hard to believe he has been this sick for only a few years; it feels like this has been going on forever. When it started, they used to explain things to me more carefully. I’ve had it explained by guidance counselors, family therapists, and neighbors who don’t have any idea what they’re talking about. It got to the point where the same kind of things kept happening, over and over again, and there wasn’t any point in explaining anymore.”
--Breathless by Jessica Warman
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“What’s wrong with Will, according to every doctor who’s ever seen him, is drug-induced schizophrenia. Without all the bullying, he might never have gotten into all the drugs. It took a few years before what was happening to him became clear; typically, schizophrenia doesn’t begin to show itself until later in a person’s adolescence or early twenties. But Will has never been typical, and people in this town were unusually cruel.”
--Breathless by Jessica Warman “If it weren’t for this town, and everything the people did to him, Will might not even be sick. He was smart as a kid—he still is—and it was too much for people here to handle. I think that seeing how smart he was, how successful our parents were becoming, made them realize how tiny and sad their own lives were.”
--Breathless by Jessica Warman “They get his head on straight again, and once he’s doing better, they send him home. After a while, he feels so good that he decides he can manage life himself, the he doesn’t need to be medicated. So he stops taking his pills, and then everything starts all over again.”
--Breathless by Jessica Warman “BSE stands for Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy. Should I tell our studio audience morea bout it, Jim? Sure, let’s tell ‘em what I’ve won. Well, folks, it’s a fatal virus that eats holes in your brain, turning it into a sponge. The tying-shoes brain cell? Sorry, this item permanently out of stock. We regret to tell you that your gross motor skills and neurological functioning will no longer be in your control. Here’s your econo diaper pack. Watch out for those hallucinations, and have a nice day.”
--Going Bovine by Libba Bray “Dr. Klein jots down notes, and then he stops writing and just sits, ramrod straight, looking small and a little scared in his big boy chair. In the end, he hands my parents a script for antipsychotic medication and schedules some serious sessions. So, now I’ve been to see a drug counselor who told me I needed to lay off the drugs and talk about my feelings, and a shrink who heard what I had to say and immediately put me on drugs.”
--Going Bovine by Libba Bray On the ride home from the hospital I thought: How curious! You go in one day for a supposedly harmless surgery, that surgery turns into two, when you awake the disfiguring lump in your neck is gone, but so is your thyroid gland and one of your vocal cords.”
--Stitches by David Small “They were soldiers of science, and their weapon was the x-ray. X-rays could see through clothes, skin, even metal. They were miraculous wonder rays that would cure anything.”
--Stitches by David Small |