I had spent a good part of the morning moving from department to department at the hospital. My initial check-in required signing, initialing and dating pages of legal forms while digging into the pockets and corners of my wallet for insurance and I.D. cards. Once I’d proven to the administrators and clerks that I was who I claimed to be, and that I would pay them for imbuing me with new life, I was granted admittance and ordered to proceed to the Interventional Radiation Department.

It’s a big hospital. They do their best to move you along with a verbal explanation followed by a map painted on the corridor floors in multicolored stripes.

A heavy woman with an impassive smile and a name tag labeling her as “Helen” gave me the verbal piece, “Just follow the red line over there, then turn left, past the elevator, pick up the blue line to the stairs, go up a floor, then turn right on the yellow line.” She held up a finger, turned to another woman and asked, “Is that the yellow line, or the yellow and orange line?” The other woman answered with a nod and Helen continued, “Okay. There’s a yellow and an orange line up there, but that’s okay. Just turn right and keep going. When it becomes just the yellow line, follow that to Radiation. It’s real easy, Hon.”

I left on my journey to the Radiation Department following the lines like a donkey in a wagon train, all the while thanking the gods that I wasn’t born colorblind. I had to pee. It often happens when I’m nervous, but I was afraid to stop at a Men’s room for fear of getting lost in yet another set of colors.

I saw that the yellow line ended ahead of me and continued to hobble as fast as I could move with my swollen bladder into the reception area where I found a rest room inside the Interventional Radiation Department.

Refreshed and with a feeling of renewed confidence I approached two Asian women sitting behind a glass enclosure at the reception desk. They were expecting me, and after checking me in, sent me to a changing area where I was given a gown and injection by an Asian man dressed in a stunning white lab suit. He told me that he had given me a light sedative to relax me. I followed him down a dim corridor, through a shiny steel door into a large operating room.

A coven of women dressed in milky green-colored uniforms welcomed me. They were covered from head to foot in a paper-like fabric that made a scratching sound like bubble pack on a bicycle wheel with their every move. Everyone but me wore a plastic face guard and a matching green net to cover hair and heads. Their faces were hidden under the large clear plastic masks that reflected the green of their gowns against the eerie luminous white walls and ceilings surrounding us.

The room was cold. I was helped to lie on a shiny metal gurney as two of them admired my tattoos with their fingertips while pulling my shirt open. I heard the cutting and stitching implements rattling on a metal tray over my head, but my vision was already clouding from the drug injected earlier. The man in the white uniform had seemed to disappear, and I began to feel the drug dragging me deeper into relaxation while causing my anxiety to quell.

My mind went to the stories that we have all heard and read about the abductees of extraterrestrial alien creatures. They got me. Right here in the bowels of a huge American hospital. I let my imagination run down the long dark hallway of that horror through the entire procedure. They got me but I no longer cared. Are they speaking English? Why did the people in this department all have similar facial features?

The coven of alien women smiled and joked after cutting, installing and stitching a PIC line into my carotid artery. I no longer understood them and wondered aloud how long they had me.

I looked down at their installed creation, the PIC line. It dangled across my chest with the colorful look of two small braided Jamaican reggae pigtails. They dressed me, high-fived one another, dropped me onto a wheel chair and left me for transfer to who knows where.

I wilted there, wondering who would come to get me and where I would go from there. I thought of, but then discarded, any chance to escape because I could be somewhere in deep space, surrounded by alien beings, without the knowledge of what color line would take me home.