The Patient Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

The Patient - Essay Example It was a Wednesday afternoon in June, and I almost didn't go to rehearsals because I had a lot of assignments to do and a class from 5-6, but things were getting really exciting at Ashe and I hated missing a single day. We were in the middle of a cruel dance workout with our director and choreographer "Joe-Joe", when our music teacher, Conrad, came over and whispered in his ear. We were at a loss to know what "Joe-Joe" meant, until Conrad brought us some tie-and-died t-shirts and urged us to don them quickly while explaining that we were going to sing "Friends" (Dionne Warwick), a song that we had been rehearsing, at a special occasion. He gave no further details. He crammed us into the bus, ran a quick warm up and role-check (I was singing the female lead) and took us away under the cover of night like Ali Baba and the Forty (in our case, Four) Thieves! We arrived at a suburban house in an unfamiliar part of town. Under a majestic tree with protective far-spreading branches sat about a hundred people in clusters of threes and fours. It wasn't what I had expected. I thought we were going to perform on a real stage, but a house Little did I know that due to the stigma on AIDS at the time, the hospices were kept secret, to avoid the scorn of local residents. Conrad hustled us "backstage", which was only inside the house, as we were to perform in under ten minutes. At first we stood in a confused huddle in a semi-lighted corner of the entrance hall, but little by little, events started to pull our uncomprehending attention to our unbelievable surroundings. The first shock to my system was when a man - medium height, with muscles and a firm build that he showed off with a black muscle-shirt and a tight-fitting jeans - sauntered by us and hugged and kissed Conrad on the cheek (Conrad was tall and skinny with knock-knees). I imagined my jaws dropped open (but I really didn't react just then), as I registered the similarity in the two men: the bald head, the earrings in both ears. I exchanged a glance with my then-best-friend Stephanie, and I saw her eyes growing round like an 'O'. Our eyes said everything. Now I awoke to the half-closed doors that lined one side of the hall. Through one I could just make out beds on which were hanging sore-dotted feet. Then as I watched, a women started going in and out of the rooms, bearing food, medication, towels, and a long-suffering expression on her face. Steph and I sidled to a more advantageous point for snooping, and lived to regret it. Inside one room were three beds and three painfully meager, pot-bellied, half-naked children, who looked as if they were living just to die. One of them was a boy with an everlasting head and a tiny body. The little that he had was either covered in bandages or running sores that the "nurse" had to keep bathing in a pungent liquid and threaten him not to touch. In the second room a fairly young man was staring in melancholy at his amputated leg, while on the bed beside his, a male "nurse" was having a hard time trying to feed an emaciated man who would yell for food as soon as the nurse was gone, but would tur n from it in revulsion as soon as it