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Always when this day is wafted to memory, I reckon that it was the least misfortune I wished never to have before befallen me, the week I spent in bed. Inspite of the appeal of the police, exhorting, careful driving, a reckless, wheeling at maddening speed bumped against me. As I had sustained multiple injuries I was urgently conveyed to the hospital. The lapse of time I spent under the roof of that medical institution was punctuated by a series of negative experience.
Tasteless food and unfriendly patients hovering around were two of the many features that disgusted me in that general word. The bed was worse than a bed of nails and I would have preferred to sleep on the cold damp floor. No longer being able to bear the boring and non-amicable atmosphere, I insisted that I was allocated a personal ward. It was 9 o’clock in the evening when I found myself alone in my ward after my parents had left for home. The room was shrouded with an inky obscurity as I lay on bed trying to grasp sleep. Suddenly I sensed an abnormal presence. I strained my eyes to the extreme limit of vision to make out the human presence. An icy sensation of fright slithered up my spine as I struggled to muster courage, dashed out of bed and put on the lights. I had to let my eyelids adapt to the bright source of light before I was robbed of speech and before I could make out the scenes of horror that were to follow. So shocked was I that I remained still – riveted on the spot, not realizing that my legs were natural means of locomotion which I could make avail of to look for safer grounds.
A million of thoughts were swirling through my mind, all of them more frightening than the other as I acknowledged dark-clothed man standing in front of me. The intruder was so horrible looking that it sent shivers down my spine. In less than no time, he grasped my hands and tied me to the metal bed as I desperately cried, screamed and raved. He handled a knife and pitilessly ran its sharp blade in my flesh, opening my unhealed wounds, making it trickling with blood. He threatened to have my hand cut if I continued to wrestle. He silenced me by placing a gag in my mouth. Frightfully, I stared in his eyes which were full of revulsion and the fear that felt slackened my breathing. Sweat wriggled from my scalp and dribbled in my eyes and stung them. I tried to race my brain for a hasty plan of defense when the rogue laughed – he laughed almost in a triumphant way, as if he had accomplished a great feat; not bothering whether the nurses and doctors might have heard him. Indeed what I hopefully thought turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I heard the door-knob turn and in rushed the nurses and the other persons forming the administration of the hospital. As soon as the vagabond saw them, he let out a loud cry despair and drowned his body on the floor.
The nurses and doctors quickly intervened and gripped him firmly dragged out of the room. I was released of the bed I was fettered to and ushered to quick medical assistance. My parents were soon informed and they rushed to the hospital. The doctor said that he was himself shocked by the incidents; he further explained the evil man I had encountered, was one of the hospital’s patients and was mentally disturbed. The man had committed a series of murders before and was never imprisoned and he thought of himself as a murderer due to his mental sickness. Nobody knew how he had managed to escape from the highly secured ward he was administered.
The passage of time is susceptible to efface if not attenuate he bitterest of these experiences, but I knew that night I would never fall in oblivion. Not a single night after I left the hospital elapsed without my thinking that a burglar or a sadist would burst into my house…