Bad Fits

There was one patient this week that’s been needling at me more than the others. Male, late 30s, looked like he’d just walked out of an office job in the town centre. No alcohol on his breath, and his tox screen came back suspiciously clean—nothing in his system that should account for the state he was in. He responded to pain stimulus incredibly late, like there was a physical lag between the pinch and the brain registering it. But when he did finally react, it wasn’t a flinch; it was an explosion of force. It took three security guards to get him into a chair, and he didn’t even make a sound the whole time. No shouting, no swearing, just heavy, mechanical breathing. Afterwards, he just stood there in the middle of the bay, breathing through his mouth and staring at a crack in the linoleum floor. The official notes in his file just say ‘agitated.’ That’s the problem with hospital shorthand—it isn’t wrong, exactly, but it’s not right either. ‘Agitated’ implies a person who is upset. This man wasn’t upset. He was… occupied. Like his body was running a background program that took up 99% of his processing power. I watched him for twenty minutes and he didn’t blink once. I keep telling myself it’s a new synthetic drug hitting the streets, but something about the stillness of him makes my skin crawl.