01 Nov I Found a Lump on My Arm, Now We’re All Going to Die

Mortality is a weird thing.  It hits you like a bag of bricks once you make it to your late twenties or early thirties. It’s about the time when your family starts getting diagnosed with all kinds of disease, heart attacks, strokes, cancer…

For me, facing mortality meant something as innocuous as finding an odd lump on my arm while showering.

It might not sound like a big deal, but it’s important to note that my younger brother died from osteosarcoma, a fairly aggressive bone cancer, and for him, it was nothing more than a small, tender, unmoving lump he found on his leg.

Even then, it was too late, and he died a year later at the age of seven, which meant I was absolutely horrified to discover a similar lump on myself.

Over the course of a few days, as I awaited my doctor’s appointment, the lump grew ever-so-slightly. It had a strange shape, like a column of bone that hurt to touch.

During the examination, the doctor looked at me with concern in his eyes. It pretty much confirmed what I’d already suspected, that the growth was bone, and that it would probably turn out to be cancer.

He didn’t hesitate with referring me to a radiologist, and told me to return once the imaging had been done.

A few days later I returned, and as I sat in the office, on the brink of tears, a thousand thoughts ran through my head: What to tell my sister, how to spend the remaining time left on Earth, would it hurt as much as it did with my brother? At the very least they’d certainly have to amputate my arm, which would severely compromise my gaming abilities, can you even drive with one arm?

Then the doctor called me in…

He didn’t seem concerned, but baffled, as if he hadn’t the faintest clue what was wrong with me.

After some consideration, he finally started speaking, unleashing a jumbled mess of medical terms and incomprehensible sentences. He took a deep breath before finally stammering out:

“It– it’s not cancer,”

Despite the presumably good news, he didn’t seem relieved. There was something he held back.

“Then what’s wrong?” I asked.

“It’s a– it’s a tooth.”

He couldn’t explain it any further, so he just showed me the x-ray. Even with my limited anatomical knowledge, I could see it clear as day: a tooth was growing straight out from my ulnar, its roots firmly cemented in the bone, while the crown pushed on the surrounding tissue.

On one hand, it wasn’t cancer.  On the other, I had an impossible, bizarre growth extruding from the wrong part of my own skeleton.

The doctor sat down with me and explained the concept of teratomas, a type of benign tumor that frequently grows hair, skin and partially-developed organs. Despite its unusual presentation, we settled on that idea and scheduled me for surgery.

It was a quick and simple procedure. A couple of days later, they discharged me and told me to rest a bit before returning to work.

I was content, though admittedly a little bit disturbed by the whole ordeal.

Life went on, and my arm healed up nicely. The scar almost completely covered up by the inappropriate amount of hair I’d started growing during my teenage years.

A couple of weeks passed, and the surgery was all but a distant memory.

Then, after a morning of increasing back pain, I found blood in my urine…

Doctors will typically tell you not to get all riled up just because you found blood in your piss, because it could be caused by pretty much anything, and might not be blood at all.

However, I did worry, and with a sense of panic, I rushed to the emergency clinic, where they quickly tested my urine to confirm the presence of hemoglobin.

That, alongside my back pain, made them feel confident I was suffering from nothing more than an innocent little kidney stone.

One of the interns performed an ultrasound scan just to rule out cysts and whatnot, but her casual demeanor quickly turned to an expression of fear as she put the sensor against my skin.

She excused herself and left the room, only to return after ten minutes, dragging with her an older, presumably more experienced doctor. He seemed annoyed to have been called in for something as simple as an ultrasound.

He grabbed the device without introducing himself, and tried looking for a kidney. Just as with the intern, his annoyed confidence quickly turned to one of worry, and he too, left without explaining what the hell was going on.

By then, my discomfort had turned to excruciating agony. They’d already put me on an overabundance of painkillers, but it barely put a dent in the suffering I had to endure.

I stood up to grab hold of the doctor, ready to demand answers, but once I got to my feet, my vision started fading, and I collapsed to the ground.

From there, my memory was hazy; a combination of pain and drugs put me in a trance-like state. I vaguely remember being taken for some sort of scan, and a tube being shoved down my throat, and finally, everything turned black.

* * * * * *

It would take me two days to awaken once more. At which point I was greeted by a team of specialists, all looking way out of their depth.

They explained as best they could: That I’d fallen into a coma following severe, internal bleeding, and that I was an inch away from death when I was brought into the operating theatre.

I had almost died, and if not for an insane stroke of luck, I wouldn’t have realized.

Despite the success of the surgery, they still seemed nervous, and I could tell there was more to the story. After a lot of talking around the point, and even more bizarre medical terms I couldn’t possibly comprehend, I got mad.

“Just tell me what the fuck is happening to me!”

The oldest of the bunch, finally stepped up and started explaining himself.

“Mr. Woodcomb, to be brutally honest, we haven’t the faintest clue what kind of affliction you’ve come down with. Quite frankly, it’s beyond anything we’ve dealt with in the past.”

“Wha– What does that mean?  Am I going to die?” I asked.

He took a deep breath.

“We can’t know how the disease will progress, but–”

“What is happening to me?” I yelled as I tried to sit up, still too groggy from the drugs, unable to feel the presence of my own body.

He explained what had happened to me, that my stomach had started migrating towards my left flank, where it had enveloped itself around my kidney, slowly, but certainly absorbing and digesting it. The process obviously severed its blood supply, which caused the bleed that almost killed me. They’d fixed the tooth, and they’d stopped the bleeding, but a part of me knew it wasn’t over.

“I’m still not fixed, am I?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Woodcomb, but this disease, we don’t know how to stop it. At this point, we’re just treating the symptoms.”

By then, I’d woken up enough to coordinate my movements, but I still couldn’t feel my right arm.

I turned my head to check on it, and saw that the vast majority of my lower, and half my upper arm, had turned almost completely white. I tried to lift it, but my muscles simply wouldn’t budge.

The skin looked so smooth, like perfect silk covering an almost shapeless blob. I’d always been a skinny, albeit toned person, so my veins were fairly prominent. Except that now, they’d all seemingly vanished from my forearm, leaving nothing but a stump of a vessel I could see actively retract away under my skin.

“It happened just before you woke up.  There was no time.  We couldn’t–”

“What the fuck is happening to me?” I asked once more.

“We don’t know,” he said.

I looked at him in despair; these were the people that were supposed to help me.  If even the professionals were baffled, I was screwed.

“Mr. Woodcomb, your arm has absolutely no blood supply. I’m sorry, but we need to amputate it as quickly as possible.  You shouldn’t even be awake right now.”

They made me sign a consent form before proceeding. Just the act of writing my own name with my one remaining, functioning arm, was an excruciating ordeal.

Another few hours went by, and my right arm was a part of the past.

Once I woke up from my third surgery, the doctors informed me that I was to be transferred to a more specialized health facility; they didn’t even have the courtesy to call it a hospital.

They airlifted me, wrapped in a containment box of sorts, to prevent the spread of a disease that could potentially be contagious.

While flying, I was strapped down with no view of my surroundings. Wherever they were taking me, they wouldn’t tell, and based on the few glimpses I got of the world beneath us, I wouldn’t have known anyway.

On the ground, I was met by a team of doctors dressed in hazmat suits. The ‘health facility,’ looked more like a warehouse than anything else, and didn’t ease the growing fear within me.

They rolled me through an airlock, ensuring nothing infectious could get in, or out.

The inside of the facility was a massive, isolated room with hundreds of patients lined up next to each other, no rooms for privacy, nor drapes to keep them apart, which meant that they all probably suffered from the same condition as me.

One of the patients stared at me. He panted with shallow breaths, as his chest had transformed into a thick wall of bone, each rib fused together, making breathing an almost impossible task.

Another, younger woman, had skin that seemed to be shrunken a few sizes too small, stretching to the point where it had become a pathetic cover of epithelium, allowing her muscles to be clearly visible.

But the worst was the patient in the bed next to mine. All his limbs had been amputated, and the entirety of his skin was covered in thick, bright red arteries, some of them actively bleeding, while others had been burned in a futile attempt at cauterizing them.

He groaned in agony, almost inaudible, strained sounds emerging from his toothless, tongueless mouth. His eyes and nose were missing, replaced by seemingly healthy skin, simply grown over most of his orifices, including his ears and scalp.

He was trapped in pain, unable to hear, see, or communicate with the world around him, but if he could, I’m certain he would’ve begged for death.

After a couple of hours of staring at the horrifically mangled people around me, a doctor approached me. He was a tired looking, old man that had been broken by the afflictions of others.

“I’m Dr. Foreman.  Your name is Eric Woodcomb, correct?”

I nodded.

“I’m going to administer a drug.  It’ll slow down the progression of the disease.”

“Will it help, can you please help me?” I asked frantically.

He looked around, seeming to check if anyone could hear us speak.

“It’ll slow it down, but it won’t cure it. We’re not even sure what causes this disease, but anti-mitotic drugs seem to put it into a sort of stasis.”

“What is ‘it,’ exactly?” I asked with a trembling voice.

“It’s an infection, Mr. Woodcomb, though it’s not bacterial, viral, fungal, parasitic, or prion in origin. All I know is that it affects anyone that touches it, and that we’re not going to be able to contain it for long.”

I then asked a question I already knew the answer to.

“Am I going to die?”

He just nodded, his emotionless face never changing.

“Ho–how long do I–” I said, before he interrupted me.

“A week, maybe two. Once the disease has converted all of your organs to an incomprehensible mess, and when even the most experienced forensics team would be unable to recognize your corpse as that of a human being, that’s when you’ll die.”

His bedside manner left a lot to be desired, but it was obvious that he’d gone through that speech a hundred times before. He was detached, desensitized from the nightmare that surrounded him.

As he turned around to leave, I noticed his arm had bone spicules, skeletal spikes protruding through his skin.

“Doctor, your arm.”

He looked down at it and sighed. “I told you it was infectious, everyone in this room, staff, patients, even the fucking dogs that have lurked around the site. The guys outside wearing hazmat suits have been hunting them down, but it’s too late for that. Not that their fancy protection gear will help them, but I’m not going to break that news to them.”

I was speechless, and he could tell his words hadn’t comforted me in the least, he just didn’t care.

“I’m sorry, but you should make peace with your family, friends, whatever you have in this world, because if we don’t find a viable cure within the next week, they’re torching this place.”

* * * * * *

As the days progressed, they kept bringing in more and more patients. Some looked mostly normal, healthy even, while others were unrecognizable, their faces replaced by a solid mesh of flesh, and their organs relocated to the surface of their skin.

One of them had his heart placed outside of his chest, beating as if nothing had happened, with thousands of additional arteries extending from it, like a red spiderweb covering most of his torso.

The pain must have been too much, because as he walked past my bed, he grabbed his own heart, attempting to rip it off. A few of the arteries tore open, spurting crimson blood all around him, but the heart itself wouldn’t budge.

He groaned, and with one final pull, he fell dead to the ground, clutching a clump of meat he’d managed to pull from the now, dead heart.

As they lifted his lifeless body onto a stretcher, I got a better view of his face. I realized that I recognized him. He’d been the doctor that examined my lump, the tooth stuck in my bone.

He died because of me…

On the fifth day of my containment, I started to lose vision in one of my eyes. I could feel it pulsating, growing within its socket, but I didn’t dare look at myself in the mirror.

A few hours passed, and suddenly I just felt a pop, followed by the sensation of a viscous liquid, trickling down my face.

My eye had exploded, and still, I didn’t have the guts to put myself in front of a mirror or to call out for help.

In a couple of days, they’ll burn this place to the ground in an attempt at preventing the spread of whatever disease has infected us. The doctors aren’t hopeful about a cure, but fire seems the safest option, just turning us all to ash, a price worth paying to save the world I suppose.

At least they’ve given us all a chance to call our loved ones, but I don’t have much of a family left, so to speak.

The thing bothering me the most is that I’ll most likely die without knowing what killed me, where the disease came from, and how I could have avoided it all together; Hindsight is 20/20 and all that.

Not that it matters to me.  I’m already dead, but whatever finally got me, it’s still out there…