Acrobaddict by Joe Putignano

in the emergency room for a treatment with a nebulizer. The nebulizer allowed me to breathe better, but I was ashamed of using it because of its pipe-like structure that resembled a hookah. In my mind I was an athlete, and drugs were the substances created for the weak and desperate. In addition to the nebulizer treatment, I was given injections of prednisone, a steroid that decreased the inflammation in my lungs. That medication is not the same as the much-abused testosterone and muscle-building anabolic steroids, but I was scared my teammates wouldn’t know the difference.
    I became fascinated by the hospital and quickly began to pick up the medical terminology for my ailments. I had visited the emergency room so many times for my asthma that I began to feel like an intern. There was something romantic about a person who could prescribe medication. Those doctors were powerful to me, and I was attracted to the patient-doctor pattern—illness, diagnosis, medication. In a peculiar way, I felt I belonged there.
    The doctors had changed my medications many times, and it was difficult to know which prescription made me feel better; all of them left me feeling hyper and edgy. During the numerous X-rays taken of my lungs, the doctors discovered an abnormality in my rib cage. This was more evidence that I was born different. I was born with an extra rib, a deformity that could not be seen by the human eye and was basically purposeless. My mom, who always tried to turn my awkward discomfort into ease, was a witness to the doctor’s discovery. Excitedly, she recalled the story she had been told as a child in church, about how God had taken one of Adam’s ribs with which to create Eve. She had read that Adam had been given an extra rib, like me.
    As a boy, I didn’t attend church because it conflicted with gymnastics competitions that were held on Sundays. I found the sport to be a much grander religion, with a more promising outcome than any story supposedly written by God and told by men. My mom’s story made me feel better, and even though this extra rib didn’t hurt me in any way, I would have given it back to be “normal.”
    A new asthma medication started giving me horrible anxiety, and I constantly believed something bad was going to happen. Panic and despair replaced my inability to breathe, and I would lie in bed wide awake. It wasn’t just a few hours of thinking of the many horrors and wonders the world held; no, this insomnia kept me awake until morning. The daylight announced a horribly arduous day ahead without any peace at all. A sleepless night left me feeling like my entire body was filled with rusty nails, heavy and dull, and my daily tasks at school followed by gymnastics practice seemed impossible to complete.
    In the quiet of night I would sit in my room, staring at the walls, terrified for no obvious reason. I could never pinpoint what was behind those feelings, but it brought up an overwhelming desire to create something beautiful. At first, the feeling urged me to produce something original, to make some form of art or create something from nothing. I knew if I did not begin to create, I would live forever in frustration.
    The form of creativity that eventually drew me in was writing. During my fits of sleeplessness I would write to keep the panic at bay, and the more I wrote, the more I had the desire to do so. I called my stories and my desire to write “ghosts,” and they moaned and lingered, stabbing me until their tales were written exactly as they tormented me to. Ghost-writing was the only way to freedom. Strangely, when I finished with one story, another one appeared, and sometimes two or three entered at the same time. I would sit on my bed, pen in hand, scribbling and writing, thinking beyond my imagined limits and discovering pieces of myself.
    After endless attempts to fall asleep, I willingly surrendered to my imagination and began to summon the ghosts to my side. They were always in