Did anyone else go to the night doctor?

Growing up, I got sick a lot. It was a chronic battle of brain-boiling fevers and immobilizing body aches, long nights spent curled over the toilet bowl while my mother or father tiredly rubbed circles into my back to comfort me. It seemed as though I caught every bug that went around. Despite this, my parents always called me their miracle child. Apparently when I was born, I wasn’t likely to make it out of the NICU, but I was a fighter.

Mom would always say, “Whatever you catch once just makes you stronger!”

I tried to believe her.

Some days I was scared I’d never be well again.

I was in and out of doctors’ offices a lot. I was accustomed to spending long hours under the sickly fluorescents of waiting rooms in stiff uncomfortable chairs, playing on my GameBoy Color until the battery got low, then reading from the boring selection of health digest magazines to giggle at rude words and weird diagrams until the nurse called me up.

It’s because of this familiarity with doctor’s offices that I struggled for years to decipher if the story I’m about to share really happened, or if it was just a surreal collage of experiences made up by my overactive subconscious to fill in the gaps. You know how distinct events of the past can blend together with time. You might mistake a childhood dream or television program for a real memory, though its contents seem impossible.

But those nights cling to the recesses of my brain like a creeping mildew. Each time I dare to recall one, the details are vivid, painful, and exactly the same.

The memories are real. I know they are. I have scars to prove it.

Here’s one memory from when I was ten years old. I recall waking up sweating under my Spiderman sheets. The digital alarm clock glowing red on my bedside table read 11:59 PM. I felt paralyzed with fear, so panicked that I couldn’t breathe or call out for help, but I didn’t know why. I could make out the shapes of my desk and table lamp and closet and my stuffed stegosaurus on the rocking chair in the corner. There was another shape, too, and I realized that it wasn’t overheating that had woken me up.

There was a large man standing in my bedroom right next to my head. He was looking at me. The red light of the clock reflected on his glasses.

I screamed for my parents at the top of my lungs. They came in and turned the lights on and tried to calm me down. The man was still there, and he looked pale and just as scary in the light. He was an older man, taller than my father, his face sunken with drooping jowls. His eyes were recessed beneath heavy lids. They looked too small for his eye sockets, like he was peeking out from behind his own face. He reminded me of a latex Halloween mask of an old man I’d seen at Walmart a week prior. Sort of melting and hollow.

I remember my mom apologizing to him, and my dad leaning down to talk to me.

They called him Dr. Moris. I hated him. They told me he was going to ask me a few questions and examine me, and then I could go to sleep again.

I didn’t know what to say at the time but I remember thinking everything was mostly alright then. Since my parents weren’t alarmed, I went along with it.

Dr. Moris sat at my bedside and asked for one arm, then the other. My sleeves were already rolled up. He took a measuring tape from his coat pocket and measured both of my arms, first from shoulder to elbow, then elbow to wrist. He did my legs. Then, my spine.

He asked if I played sports, and if I got along well with other kids. I said I did. I played soccer, and I had some friends down the street.

The doctor nodded along.

“We will be meeting a lot from now on,” I remember him saying, or something like it. “If you want to grow big and strong, I’ll need to see you as you grow.”

He stood up, said something quietly to my parents, and then we were done. He left the room as quickly as he’d arrived.

My parents tucked me in and I went back to sleep, too tired to ask any questions.

The next weird memory begins with me waking up again. The digital clock showed 11:30 PM in glowing red. The alarm sound was going off, playing the same repeating chime and crunchy bird foley that I heard every morning before school. I thought it was a mistake. I turned it off. Then Mom came in and told me to get in the car. I asked why and she reminded me that I had an appointment.

I remember sitting in the back seat trying not to fall asleep on the way there. I think I did, because next I remember being in a room with white walls and a popcorn ceiling, lying on a cushioned table. There was a hole in one of the tiles. I studied that dark empty spot, too sleepy to move or look at much else.

A nurse came in eventually and asked me things like how old I was and what TV shows I liked while she took my vitals. I talked to her about the Electric Company for a while. She drew an X on my right arm.

The nurse brought in a second person, an old lady with a surgical mask. Her eyes looked equally beady, like her features were sinking into themselves. I smelled ammonia and burnt cookies.

I remember her singing the Electric Company theme while fitting a mask over my nose and mouth. I started singing along too.

Then Dr. Moris was there too, and he said it was nice to see me again.

I have a scar on my left forearm. It runs from the knob of my elbow all the way to the base of my palm.

I asked Dad about it recently. He said I’d gotten into a nasty bike accident when I was around ten while biking to my friend Leland’s house down the street.

“I thought we’d have to amputate it,”he always likes to joke whenever he tells the story to our extended family.

I don’t remember any of that. Just the arm.

I remember coming home with my left arm wrapped in a sling. It felt numb, but also tingling, like it was full of tiny spiders. It was dark when we got home. I was already in my PJs. I remember sliding into bed and looking at my alarm clock. It was 3:00 AM.

It took months to heal. All my friends in class asked about it, and I just told them I got into an accident. I sort of enjoyed being the center of attention for those weeks.

Then it kept happening.

I definitely went to the night doctor more than one time. What I’ve shared so far was just the earliest night I can remember.

I have over 42 scars on my body that I can see. My wife has helped me to point out ones on my back that I’d never even noticed before. The number just keeps climbing.

Some of the scars are long and thin, some are small and round or criss-crossed. Some have healed better than others. Perhaps some have healed so well with time as to be nearly undetectable.

I have far fewer than 42 distinct memories of visiting the night doctor. If I think about this fact for too long my stomach starts to turn and I want to throw it all up, to somehow evict every memory I do have from my skull for good.

I shower in the dark these days.

Thankfully, my health has miraculously improved as I’ve gotten older. As an adult, I’ve struggled with a pretty bad phobia of medical settings, a condition which until recently I assumed was from being ill so frequently in my adolescence.

I take every tonic and preventative supplement I can get my hands on to knock out even the slightest cold before it requires any antibiotics. I work out constantly, but never overexert enough to cause damage any muscles or bones. I go to sleep at exactly 9 PM and wake up at 6 AM on the dot.

You’ll never find me in a doctor’s office.

But two nights ago, I had a throbbing pain in my chest so strong that it caused me to drop the coffee pot all over the kitchen floor. My wife rushed me to the ER. After a harrowing round of evals, they said I would be ok, but that they had several questions.

Following a full CT scan of my body, they called me back to do another round. The technician apologized, saying that the machine had been acting up.

On the second attempt, they found something so rare that it was deemed medically impossible.

The amount of distortion and visual interference in the scan image suggested that I had over 100 implants placed at random intervals across my body.

“Like a titanium knee or something?” I’d asked the technician jokingly, picking at the IV tape. “I don’t have arthritis.”

“Like a titanium everything,” she responded. “Why didn’t you tell me you were a cyborg?”

I could tell she was trying to keep the mood light while we waited for the third round of tests to come back. I could also tell she still believed it was a crazy fluke with the machine.

The third round of testing arrived. After reading the print-out, I want to believe it’s a fluke. It doesn’t make any sense. I’ve read it over and over. It hurts my head more each time.

According to their findings, I am missing around 66% of my skeletal mass, scattered in pockets, from small finger bones and toes to my clavicle, scattered vertebrae, entire ribs, my left and right ulna and radius, pieces of my pelvis, and the interlocking curves of my skull. All gone, all surgically removed and methodically replaced with something artificial and lightweight with near-perfect accuracy. The ER staff could provide no other information.

Whatever it is, it is not bone.

Internal scarring implies that several implants were moved, extended, or readjusted on numerous separate occasions, likely to mimic natural growth.

I wonder what became of my leftovers.