Veronika Decides to Die (On the Seventh Day 2)

But the heart attack was different from what she had imagined; her breathing became laboured, and Veronika was horrified to realize that she was about to experience the worst of her fears: suffocation. She was going to die as if she were being buried alive or had suddenly been plunged into the depths of the sea.

She stumbled, fell, felt a sharp blow on her face, continued making heroic efforts to breathe, but the air wouldn't go in. Worst of all, death did not come. She was entirely conscious of what was going on around her, she could still see colors and shapes, although she had difficulty hearing what others were saying; the cries and exclamations seemed distant, as if coming from another world. Apart from this, everything else was real; the air wouldn't enter her lungs, it would simply not obey the commands of her lungs and her muscles, and still she did not lose consciousness.

She felt someone touch her and turn her over, but now she had lost control of her eye movements, and her eyes were flickering wildly, sending hundreds of different images to her brain, combining the feeling of suffocation with a sense of complete visual confusion.

After a while the images became distant too, and just when the agony reached its peak, the air finally rushed into her lungs, making a tremendous noise that left everyone in the room paralyzed with fear.

Veronika began to vomit copiously. Once the near-tragedy had passed, some of the crazy people there began to laugh, and she felt humiliated, lost, paralyzed.

A nurse came running in and gave her an injection in the arm.

"It's all right, calm down, it's over now."

"I didn't die!" she started shouting, crawling toward the other patients, smearing the floor and the furniture with her vomit. "I'm still in this damn hospital, forced to live with you people, living a thousand deaths every day, every night, and not one of you feels an ounce of pity for me."

She turned on the nurse, grabbed the syringe from his hand, and threw it out into the garden.

"And what do you want? Why don't you just inject me with poison, since I'm already condemned to die? How can you be so heartless?"

Unable to control herself any longer, she sat down on the floor again and started crying uncontrollably, shouting, sobbing loudly, while some of the patients laughed and made remarks about her filthy clothes.

"Give her a sedative," said a doctor, hurrying in. "Get this situation under control."

The nurse, however, was frozen to the spot. The doctor went out again and returned with two more male nurses and another syringe. The men grabbed the hysterical girl struggling in the middle of the room, while the doctor injected the last drop of sedative into a vein in her vomit-smeared arm.

She was in Dr. Igor's consulting room, lying on an immaculate white bed with clean sheets on it.

HE WAS listening to her heart. She was pretending that she was still asleep, but something inside her must have changed, judging by the doctor's muttered words:

"Don't you worry. In your state of health, you could live to be a hundred."

Veronika opened her eyes. Someone had taken her clothes off. Who? Dr. Igor? Did that mean he had seen her naked? Her brain wasn't working properly.

"What did you say?"

"I said not to worry."

"No, you said I could live to be a hundred."

The doctor went over to his desk.

"You said I could live to be a hundred," Veronika repeated.

"Nothing is certain in medicine," said Dr. Igor, trying to cover up. "Everything's possible."

"How's my heart?"

"The same."

She didn't need to hear any more. When faced with a serious case, doctors always say: "You'll live to be a hundred," or "There's nothing seriously wrong with you," or "You have the heart and blood pressure of a young girl," or even "We need to redo the tests." They're probably afraid the patient will go berserk in the consulting room.

She tried to get up, but couldn't; the whole room started to spin.

"Just lie down a bit longer, until you feel better. You're not bothering me."

Oh good, thought Veronika. But what if I were?

Being an experienced physician, Dr. Igor remained silent for some time, pretending to read the papers on his desk. When we're with other people and they say nothing, the situation becomes irritating, tense, unbearable. Dr. Igor was hoping that the girl would start talking so that he could collect more data for his thesis on insanity and the cure he was developing.