Hospital Botox

Lina Ahrens

Lina Ahrens (she/they) is a 22-year-old anthropology student living in Berlin. She grew up in a small village in Northern Germany and has been living with chronic pain and disability since a severe brain injury in 2020. They are interested in social and cultural representations of illness, disability, and the medical, as well as writing about her own experiences as a lesbian disabled person in both academic and non-academic matters. She loves writing and listening to music, fashion and the arts, and deep-diving into random topics, as well as spending time with their loved ones.

Hospital Botox

I’m staring at the neon lamp above my head. My body is on a white table, and I can see part of the wooden roofing under the afternoon sun through the double windows. This part of the hospital grounds is beautiful. The old buildings and tiny streets remind me of a small village, a microcosmos right next to Berlin’s main train station. It’s a Tuesday in February or a Thursday in May or a Friday in August. These trimonthly visits have reorganized my sense of time. There is the time frame of a year, a month, a week, and there’s the time frame between two Botox injections. It has become part of how I make sense of how much time has passed.  Every three months a new doctor gives me 31 injections against the everlasting pain in my head.

Three in between my eyebrows. Two on each side of my forehead. Four around each ear, six at the back of my head, four at the base of my skull. Three on my left shoulders, the last three on the other one. There’s blood running from where the needle punctured the sensitive skin next to my left ear down my left shoulder. The red of the blood stands against the white of my freshly bleached blonde hair. I send my girlfriend a photo of the red stain alongside a text message saying “oftentimes, being chronically ill feels like body horror. lol”. Needles, blood, knives, drills, the screws in my skull. How strange. The doctor wipes away the blood from my shoulder, I smell the sharp disinfectant on the cotton wipe.

When I lie down, I feel an excited flutter in my stomach. Each puncture of the needle puts me towards a day-to-day life with less bed binding pain.

Every time I sit down in the waiting room of the headache ambulance, I go over what to say, how to act, how to find the right narrative balance between convincing the doctor that the treatment helps me enough to continue it and not seeming well enough for them to suggest to try to withdraw treatment. Oftentimes, going to the doctor feels like a performance, too.

My body is like an object, it is objectified, by others, by myself. I try to remind myself that I AM my body but I don’t feel like I actually own it or have control over it. I’m really not sure if I have gotten to know my body more through my chronic pain and disability or if it has estranged me from it. There’s an element of deep mistrust and disconnection and one of radical acceptance and fine tuning to its needs at the same time. I am a curious observant of myself until I realize that I am this body.

The treatment table is cold and hard but I am sick and tired, so I lie down.