“Can I please go home?” I plead to her. “I just want to go home. My birthday is in three weeks and I just want to go home.”
“I am sorry, I just cant let you leave right now.” The nurse replies with a rehearsed tone in her voice. I don't know why I keeping asking the nurses; they don’t know the answer themselves. In the doorway I can see white coats with tired faces. I bet they want to go home just as much as I do. Beeping machines and busy hallways keep me awake almost every night. It is impossible to sleep here but they give me drugs for that. They have drugs for everything. This is the only my third day here but already I miss my warm bed, my puppy and the complacency of my home. This is nothing like my home. It is cold here and no one seems to care about me, its just a job to all of them.
I have resisted asking for anything for the pain because I know that it can't be any good for my body but this morning I just can't help it. I reach for the smooth remote by my bed and press the giant red button. I lie there in my bed for several minutes until a pair of blue scrubs comes through the door to deliver me from my suffering.
“Just press that button if it starts to hurt again. I have to get back to my other patients but just press that button and a nurse will come in and give you something more.” A nameless doctor mumbles to me as he leaves through the still swinging door. Whatever he gave me seems to do nothing for the tearing that I feel inside of my chest so I press the button again. And again. And again.
“We will start you on 15 and if that doesn’t help we will move it to 20. I'll check on you in an hour, try to get some sleep ok?” The cold liquid rushes in through the tube in my arm and I can feel

myself losing control of  my weak body.
When I come to, my parents are standing several feet away from my bed, whispering.
“Here honey, go on home.” I hear my dad say to my mom. “Ill stay with him tonight, you need the rest more than I do right now.” Defeated, my mom takes the keys from his hand and shuffles through the windowless door. My dad looks up to me from his spot near the window and sees that I am awake. “I am sorry if that woke you up, son, your mother is just a little emotional right now. She hates to see you like this.” He takes a shallow breath. “We both do.”  I can see that he is distressed and I want to say something to make him feel better.
“I love you, Dad.”
My dad flashes me a weak smile then turns to face the freeway that resides 20 stories below. It pains me to see my parents like this. I can tell that they want to cry but they know that they have to be strong. Be strong for me.
Already the morning has come and already I cannot bear to be in this bed one second longer.
My dad is asleep by the window and I look up to see that the clock reads 5:15. 5:15? I don’t even wake up this early when I have places to be. I try to go back to sleep but I just can't force myself into it. My eyes flash back to the pale clock. 5:19. This proves my hypothesis in the experiment that I have been studying since my incarceration here: clocks move slower in hospitals. Days all become a large blur because the calender loses its significance. I have nowhere to go. I have nowhere I can go.
I turn on the TV and flip through the limited options that the hospital provides. My search continues for several minutes until I land on an old black and white movie. I watch as Butch and Sundance meet their end in a blaze of gunfire and am left even more depressed than when I first turned on the television. I can't wait to get out of this place. This place where even the TV fails to bring me an escape from the harsh realities present in the unforgiving world around me. I look back up to the black mirror to see a dancing snow man and a princess conjuring snowflakes. I am reminded of my little sister. She knows every song in this movie and I begin to cry.
“Are you sure I just can't get up?” I ask the nurse checking my IV. “Even for a second? I really really want to walk. I miss walking.”
“You can't get up. I am sorry. It wouldn’t be safe for you to leave your room. You are very sick and we don’t want to risk exposing you to others on the floor.”
I am discontented, to say the least, about that transaction but it is of no use to fight. I have been in this bed for three weeks so I am used to hearing the word “No.”  I feel failed by the field of medicine. Like I have been in this place much longer than I needed to be and the only people helping me are those helping me for a fee, leaving me when their tasks for the day are done but never doing what it takes to actually make me better. Day in and day out I have sat here withering in my bed, breathing in the air, almost as stale as the food that they serve me. I feel like the “Medical Professionals” attending to me are serving a machine. A machine that can not hurt nor feel, nor care.
Balloons touch my ceiling and folded cards lie scattered upon the bed. Get well soon. Happy Birthday. We miss you. It isn't the same without you. Reading the cards gives me hope and I am reminded of all the teachers, classmates and friends waiting for me to come home. My best friend, Colton, Is asleep in a chair next to my bed where he fell asleep reading a chapter of our World History textbook to me. I don't think that I have ever had a better friend in the world. I take the cards off of my lap and place them on the cold plastic tray at the foot of my bed. I look into the corner of my room to see my dad lying upon an uncomfortable green couch, next to the gifts that my mom brought to make my birthday just a little brighter.
Several more days pass, much like the 27 that proceeded them. I awake, not long after the sun, to the feeling of blood being withdrawn from a delicately placed IV in my wrist. I press the button on my remote, calling for breakfast. However, once it gets here I hardly eat a bite. This time it is my mom that wakes up on the green couch.
          
“Good morning baby, how did you sleep?” She says through a yawn.
“Not bad,” I lie. Our exchange is interrupted by a sharp rapping at my door.
“Come in!” My mom summons. A stout doctor with a weathered face enters through the open door.
“I have some news that I think you both will be very excited to hear,” The man says. As the words leave his mouth, my heart begins to race faster and faster. “The blood clot in your son's lung has dissipated enough for you to be able to begin treatment in your home.” Finally, the moment I had been waiting nearly one month for was upon me. I was going to go home. My nightmare was finally over. Over the course of the next few hours I am released from the chains binding me to that bed and returned to clothes that healthy people wear. I am now one wheel chair ride from reclaiming my life as a normal teenage boy.