The Shadow

It was almost hurtful to be introduced as Dr. Henson’s shadow. I felt shifty, unsure, a dark background noise humming aimlessly in her wake. What was even worse was the inevitable, “So, do you think that you want to go into the medical field?” question from the family members in the hospital room, the real shadows of Ambercross General Hospital’s Adolescent and Young Adult unit. In the least pretentious tone that I could muster, I’d explain to them that, yes, I was in medical school and shadowing Dr. Henson because I would be going into pediatrics and specializing in teen and adolescent medicine.

But over the past few weeks, these conversations dwindled fewer and fewer as the unit filled with more and more long-term patients. Instead, I learned how to linger as Dr. Henson recited, “Your child has been hospitalized with an unknown physical and psychiatric condition while we observe them for the next several days.” The stunned family would turn to me for confirmation, then leave the room shadowing me in one last look of warning that told me, “You could be next.”

Soon, a conference was held about this mysterious illness, and Dr. Henson invited me to sit in on my first meeting as a shadow. “I’d like to call this emergency meeting of the Tri-County Society of Adolescent and Young Adult Doctors to order. Dr. Henson, would you like to begin?” the chairman began, his little screen lighting up yellow as he spoke.

“Thank you, Dr. Martin. Yes, I’d like to introduce everybody to my shadow, Makayla Brisburn. Makayla is a med student who’s been helping me out these past few weeks, and she’ll be sitting in on the call today to get an idea on how we handle these types of situations.” She chewed on the word situations for a moment before speaking, still unsure of how to address the condition, even after years of practice.

“So, here’s what we’ve noticed about the condition, at least on our end,” another doctor began. “All of our cases have been in patients between the ages of 16 and 28. They are brought in in a catatonic state, but all of the bloodwork comes back clean. Patients exhibit brief bouts of consciousness, but express no desire to…” The doctor stopped speaking, searching for the right words as eighteen other doctors stared at their screens with blank expressions. “...snap out of it, I suppose.”

“And did the patients have any consistent traits or similar lived experience? We’ve been treating this as a case of collective psychosis,” someone theorized.

Dr. Henson un-muted her microphone button. “The majority of our patients appear to be in stable, even desirable life conditions. Students, scholars, prodigies on the rise. Young professionals, is what we’re seeing,” she explained. Several other doctors nodded.

“We’ve all spoken with the families. Have there been any consistent instances of trauma among them?” the chairman asked. More blank stares.

“No,” Dr. Henson finally said. The doctors stayed silent for a few moments before the chairman un-muted himself and cleared his throat.

“Well, then, I hate to say this, but I think that our best course of action is to treat this as a complex instance of psychosis until we see recovery. We’ve seen upticks in catatonic consciousness among people of similar demographics in the past, so I see no reason to abandon that possibility,” he concluded.

The call fell into silence again as my mind raked the patients we’d seen over the past few weeks. Kenna, the star soccer player on her university’s team. Evan, the Ivy-League PhD student. Alex, who had, in a jealousy-inducing feat, completed her residency at just 29. What could be linking them?

“Man, Makayla, you’re going to have yourself a shot at some pretty competitive residency programs when they hear that you worked during this case,” he joked. The doctors laughed uncomfortably, shadowing the subject with goodbyes as the call came to an end.

My cells fell static. “So…that’s it?” I asked Dr. Henson.

“I’m afraid that this is all we can do. We don’t have enough reported cases to issue a statement, and since we still don’t know if it’s contagious, or how it spreads, we can’t do anything to avoid it.”

“But…they’re all so young! They have so much going on in their lives! We can’t just let them put their lives on hold over this!” I protested.

“Makayla, I know how upsetting this is. But, sometimes, as doctors, it’s our job to just let science run its course until we can figure out how to intervene. The worst thing we can do is try to treat them in a way that may end up hurting them.”

I opened my mouth, speechless, parched for words, the weight of the situation shadowing any solution I could come up with. My entire life, medicine had been something so certain in my life, something that I was sure of and that was sure of itself. It never seemed like something so fluid, something that I couldn’t grab onto and solve myself.

Dr. Henson shut her laptop and unwound the stethoscope from her neck. “My shift ends at nine, but you’re welcome to stay and help with laundry or spreadsheets if Dr. Bright needs help,” she said. She turned off the lights and left the room, but I sat on the examination table in darkness and silence, repeating what had been said in the meeting in my head.

Young professionals…prodigies…catatonic state…momentary bouts of consciousness, but no desire to wake up…Why hadn’t anybody considered that? That these people with so much going on in their lives could wake up, with no desire to recover or go back to their lives? I was a young professional, a prodigy working towards something greater; what was in this condition, I wondered, that could make someone like me abandon all prospects of returning to the life that I so desperately need to be living? What could put them on hold in a world where they needed to be moving faster each day?

I was a young professional, a prodigy working towards something greater, I realized. I was susceptible. I could have just as easily fallen into their condition. Would I be able to snap out of it? Was my drive to be more than just Dr. Henson’s shadow firm enough to wake up and resume my life like before? Better yet, would I be able to bring my findings to Dr. Henson, get to the bottom of this.

I hopped off the table and patrolled the dark hallway, scanning for doctors and nurses as the night shift began. The yellow lighting dimmed my vision to a shadowy haze as I crept down the hall to the row of adolescent and young adult observation rooms.

When people ask why I’m going into adolescent pediatrics, there’s a dawdling, invisible question at the end of the sentence, like, had my own adolescence been corrupted? Was it my dream to give others the help that I never received? And, truthfully, my adolescence was simply a transition period between my childhood playing doctor with my younger brother and my adulthood studying cell and molecular biology and studying for the MCAT. It was a time of yearning for the future, living more in my imagination than reality. It had been anything but traumatic; it had been hopeful, patient.

I opened the door to Alex’s hospital room, her body nestled gently in the tissue sheets as she rested, eyes open and hazy. I jumped back at first; this was my first time in one of the patient’s rooms since they were first admitted. Her car keys and wallet sat on the chair beside the bed, ready for her to take them and drive herself away as soon as she woke up, but there was a haze of contentment in her eyes, some patient yearning washing over her.

I waved my hand in front of her face a few times. Nothing. I eyed the glass of water beside her bed, half-empty from brief sips she swallowed during momentary consciousness.

Doctors still didn’t know how Alex’s condition spread, and I certainly wasn’t a doctor yet. But I did know that respiratory contact accounts for the spread of 75–80% of all disease–if I wanted to enter this state for myself, see if I couldn’t break the trance and tell Dr. Henson everything I knew, there’s a good chance that all it would take is a sip of Alex’s water. This would be for clinical study purposes only.

I eyed the pair of scrubs that she had been wearing when she was admitted, folded neatly on the chair. Then, before I could think any further, I grabbed the cup from her bedside and chugged the rest.

My first thought was that I felt no different. In fact, for the first several hours, I was almost disappointed by how normal I felt, so I closed Alex’s door, did a load of laundry, and returned to the office where I had left my things, lounging on the examination table and waiting for something to happen.

The low buzz from the hallway’s fluorescent overhead lights shook me back. Was it morning already? How much time had passed? I sprung and opened the door. I had to get home, to sleep and study before my shift.

The door was impossibly heavy as I made my way into the hallway, which had become impossibly long and thin, shadows of nothing casting geometric black shapes across the walls. The hallway was void of all doors except the one that I had just come from, now shut and locked tight. Where was I? Had I gone back to the wrong office?

I made my way down the hall, first a curious saunter, then a walk, then, as the hum of the overhead lights became louder and the hallway grew longer, longer, I began to run, looking for any sign of an exit or corridor to dart into. My footsteps reverberated from the yellowed linoleum across the sallow walls, a booming echo that sounded like a whole group of doctors must be running down the hallway, too, searching for me. I turned around to see who was following me, but it was empty. The hallway fell silent.

I turned to continue searching for an exit, but the hallway was gone. Instead, I was in a mall, floor white tiles with molded grout between them, escalators stretching infinitely. How long had it been since I had last been in a mall? Since I was twelve, thirteen, probably? What did people even shop for at the mall, anyway? Where was everybody? Where was I?

An empty gumball machine sat in the middle of the foyer in front of me beneath a single skylight. Two limp and artificially lime house plants lay beside it, concrete planters gone gray from neglect. I reached into my pocket for a coin. Why did I need a coin? Why did I want a gumball? There weren’t any gumballs. My hand fumbled deeper, deeper into the pocket of my scrubs, sliding down the sides of my thighs, then my calves, then my ankles, as my legs and arms kept going…and going…surely they couldn’t be this long?

I yanked my hand out of my pocket and snapped back into it. What was I doing? I had to get out of here. I had work soon. I surveyed the mall, eyes scanning for a neon EXIT sign.

Suddenly, a memory: I had been here before. Had I been here before? I had been somewhere similar, I remembered, the summer between seventh and eighth grade. My friend Brigit and I were shopping for swimsuits for the pool party that Clara St. Hart was hosting next week. Where had we been shopping? I swiveled my head in search of the sparkly pink letters, but these stores weren’t pink. No, these stores were burnt orange, lime green, lettering scrawled in a handwriting I couldn’t decipher or a language I couldn’t read.

A teenage girl’s giggle made me whip my head back around. Brigit? A paper shopping bag dangled from her skinny arm along with an ensemble of friendship bracelets, her fawn legs sheathed in jean shorts and skinned knees turned sienna in the sun. She slipped a coin into the gumball machine. The gumball machine! A coin! I needed to get closer. The maraschino-red lid drew me closer as the gumball machine grew nearer and nearer, my feet still planted on the cold tile. It grew larger and larger as the coin clinked against the coin chute and the knob crackled as it turned. From the red lid, a gumball emerged, circling the glass like a fishbowl.

My eyes followed the gumball as it circled again and again and again, and I began to grow dizzy. The gumball grew bigger, purple, then green, then orange as it fell. I was falling now, too, falling with the gumball down a clear chute plunging into a thick shadow. It was terrifying, yet I felt no fear as I circled the fishbowl jar again and again, the glass growing foggier and foggier. No, it was a sense of relief that swallowed me as the chute finally came to an end, depositing me into a pit of gumballs at the bottom of the machine. I expected to land with a clack against their marble shells, but it was soft, like falling into a pit of foam blocks.

They were toy balls, not gumballs, I realized, it was a ball pit! A ball pit! So fun and festive and entertaining and why would I want to be anywhere else? A girl lingered beside me when I finally got up from my landing, but it was not Brigit. I knew her from somewhere, perhaps, somewhere deep and far away from here, where her eyes were milkier and her bones were still.

“Have we met before?” I asked, more to myself than her. “Alex?” my voice completed before I knew I was speaking again. She nodded as we made eye contact, her eyes growing hazy and far-off. She knelt down into the ball pit, and I did the same. I did not call out to her again. Her lips spread into a smile too wide for her plastic cheeks, lips parting to reveal hundreds and hundreds of teeth that looked like tiny dominoes. I erupted into laughter and grabbed a ball from the pit, chucking it at her face, which made her laugh. I felt my own eyes grow hazy, the light around us grow dim, but I was not afraid, Alex and I continuing to pelt each other with balls as our vision grew dimmer and dimmer.

“Makayla is my shadow,” she said after we stopped giggling. Her eyes came back to her, smile narrowing.

“What?” I asked.

“Makayla is. My shadow.” she repeated.

“What?” I repeated.

“Makayla,” she said.

The room went dark, then light again, then my eyes became shallow and the light became fluorescent, the balls morphing into a set of tissue sheets.

“Makayla,” she said again, except this time it wasn’t Alex. It was an older woman, a stethoscope around her neck, lab coat on, knelt beside my bed. “Makayla, wake up,” she demanded. “It’s Dr. Henson. Hello?” She waved her hand over my face, but it rippled, a vaporwave in purple and turquoise as I began to giggle. “Do you want to get up?”

I scooped up a glass of water that I knew would be on the table beside me, taking a gulp as I lay back in bed and let my eyes lose focus again. My skin melted into the tissue sheets, growing plastic and hollow as I felt myself slipping back into the ball pit, the bottom of the chute that brought me to this bright, happy, liminal place that I had been depriving myself of. Alex was still there, impossibly wide grin, domino teeth, endless waves of toy balls surrounding us. What had she just asked me, again? I did not want to get up. I was her shadow, after all.