I’ve always been nosocomephobic. For those who don’t know it’s a fear of hospitals. I don’t remember since when did I have it but what I do know is that it has been ages and all of it is related to a childhood incident that I am unable to forget or get freedom from.
I must have been around 12 years old. I did go to school and was a brilliant grade 7 student. I participated in all kinds of activities and sports too. All in all I was the apple of my parents’ eyes. We used to live in the suburbs of London. It was an open land and extremely wild in those days. My father was a barrister in the county court and my mother a simple housewife. I had 2 siblings-both younger than me.
It so happened that one day we were playing on the new set of swings that my father had setup for us in the backyard. It was a Saturday and an extremely hot one. My mother called us in for some lemonade and told us to take some rest saying that it was too sunny to play outside and we ought to take a break.
What I didn’t know was the fever I would be carrying around in the evening. My mother noticed my drooping eyes around 7pm and asked me what happened. I was clueless. She got the thermometer out of the First Aid Box and checked my fever. I was running a very high temperature of 105 degrees Fahrenheit. My parents grew worried and decided to take me to the county hospital. The doctor there assumed that I had got the typhoid fever. He gave me an injection and admitted me. When my blood panel came back, there wasn’t any typhoid there but my liver function test plus urea & creatinine were through the roof. I had started vomiting. This meant that my liver and kidneys were under severe stress. In a single day I had shrunk to a skeleton. In this pain, the doctor again gave me a couple of injections for typhoid. I had grown so phobic of the doctors coming near me that I started screaming when they used to come near me. Neither my fever had come down nor had my vomiting stopped. The doctor advised us to go to London. My father immediately got us an ambulance.
The doctor there was extremely intelligent. He first listened to my mother regarding the activities that particular day. He realized that I might have contracted the tertiary malarial fever. He started the treatment. My jaundiced eyes started returning to normal. My fever started coming down. But what didn’t come down was the fear of dying, the fear of hospitals, and the fear of injections! I still have it and I might not ever get unshackled from these childhood chains.