Nephrotic Syndrome from a flat ontology
2015
21.3.2015
I became swollen in my abdomen and legs and scrotum. There was an unbalanced relationship between the things inside my body. The body as a black box, I had no knowledge of the processes that were unfolding beneath my skin. The input seemed to be stable but the machine began to mutate, signalling a problem. I picked up my smartphone and dialled NHS 111. The phone sent out a signal to a distant satellite and this information came back to earth. Somewhere in the world a telephone by another human rang and they picked it up. A connection was established over a complex system of things transmitting energy and information to one another. As my digitally encoded voice was received by the other person they drew on an inheritance of hundreds of years of medical history to give me an informed answer about what I ought to do. Trusting the information the connection was broken and a new one was established through a similar but different complex infrastructure of things to beckon an Uber taxi driver in hybrid state with his hybrid car. Our bodies stepped inside the machine and the thing moved through an empty city toward a large, complex building. As we stepped out of the taxi the hybrid thing became less complex. Automatic doors opened wide to let us enter the A & E of Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. Person-to-person interaction occurred with uncertainty of protocol on my half. Time slowed down. My name was called and we passed into a smaller room with a human being who was in a hybrid state with a computer. She connected to me and downloaded information which was processed and transferred to her machine. She told me to return to the larger, colder, room where I waited until another human being called my name. A human being whose identity had been obscured somewhat by a blue garment covering their body took me through to a cell with uncomfortable furniture and began examining me as a tinker studies a car. He opened up my bonnet and saw that I was swollen. He hit my body with things to hear a sign from my inside. He took other things and put them inside my body, breaking the boundary between the inside and outside. He extracted blood from inside the black box and put it inside a plastic receptacle. Another fluid was extracted from my body when asked for a urine sample. These were taken away and somehow information was extracted from them. Around me this process of extracting information from other bodies was occurring. Fluids and sounds left their bodies. The man with obscured identity told me that my output was not as expected. There was protein in my urine and not enough in my blood.