These words roll off my tongue like an automated machine. I repeat this over and over, almost every single day. When I register at the counter, when I take my weight, when they draw my blood, when they feed me meds, when they come every few hours to replace my bag of poison. In the beginning, I needed some nudging. Hi Carissa, can I have your name and IC to check? Procedural. To make sure they don't feed me somebody else's poison. To make sure they send my blood to the right place. To make sure they cover their asses in case a lawsuit comes about, I wonder if that has happened before. Soon, I learn to read their lips, and then their faces. With my headphones on and Sigur Rós singing me to a fantastical place where nothing hurts and everything is slow and calm, I no longer need to pause the world in my head and the words come out from my mouth without me giving much thought. Carissa Abidin, 9272141Z. Ok, good, thank you. Allergic to.... I never understand the words that follow. Why do medical practitioners pretend that their common man patients understand the technical terms? It's all poison to me, seeing what they do to this body. No allergies. Ok, thank you. Now what we're going to do now is... And I trail back into my world with Jónsi. Most times I don't understand what he is singing either, if only Icelandic was easy to pick up. But I understand it all the same, with the melody, the chord progression, his tone, You sigh alone tonight. You begin to read everything but words. Words begin to lose weight, meaning, but it becomes easier and easier to function. It's as if when the body shuts down, all your systems go into lowest common denominator mode. Everything becomes easier. But you feel stupid. There is a world inside your head that requires not a single letter, but in the real world, you feel stupid, weak, a little handicapped. Carissa Abidin, 9272141Z. So it is with my name. It loses its weight, its meaning, it is being reduced to a common denominator. It's really a numerator, if you think about it. I've become one of. One of the many patients waiting for their number to be called. One of the many seat warmers, where the seats become their cave for 10 hours while poison enters their bodies with a symphony of beeps and bells and wishing spells. One of the red lights that let out an awful shrill when they beep the nurse because they're pretty immobile in their seats and the nurses refuse to let them go to the loo on their own fearing they might fall. Do you feel giddy? They might as well say, Do you feel giddy, 9272141Z? I've lost my body. And now they've robbed me of my name. Even the artificial string of numbers that document every breathing citizen, something I never wanted to identify with, has been taken, and now that it is theirs to keep, I wish I had it back. Carissa Abidin, 9272141Z, no allergies, no pain, no name.