I awoke one morning to the lumps on my stomach. One night I was normal, the next I wasn’t. It all happened so suddenly. My life was stripped from me in a blink. A snap of the fingers. I still can’t believe it.

I was terrified. The doctors were positively stumped. They had never seen anything like them before… two large, baseball sized lumps on both sides of my ribcage, making four total. They didn’t hurt; when I poked them with my fingers, the flesh subsided, then reformed, almost like a squishy stress ball.

“Look…” my girlfriend began, “I don’t know what these are, but you need to keep going to specialists until they figure out what the hell they are, because they’re getting bigger! Oh my god!” Sure enough, looking down revealed… softballs now. They were growing. Fucking growing!

“Cancer.” One doctor told me.

“No way.” Another doctor said. “I checked out your biopsies, and well, I’ve never seen anything like it before. I don’t think your cells are cancerous in nature… they aren’t replicating per se. They’re, well, I don’t know how to say this, they are spawning out of thin air.” He snapped his fingers.

“Imagine a magician.” The doctor said.

“Wait, what?” I said.

“Just humor me. Imagine a magician has nothing in his hand. He closes his fist, and then boom, a ball appears when he reopens his hand. That’s you! Your cells! I mean, you look in the microscope, blink, and your cell count has doubled!”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I recommend 24 hour medical supervision. I’d like to, with your consent, help find out what’s happening to you.”

“Yeah, yeah, alright.” I said. Within the day, and after copious amounts of paperwork, I was set up in a luxurious hospital suite. TV, nurses on call 24/7, and even a PlayStation. It wasn’t bad. Until the eyes.

All four lumps now had blinking, working corneas. They eyes flickered around the room, and shockingly, cried when I cried. All four eyes eventually got a yellow sleep crust in the corner of their retinas. The nurses scraped it out with cotton swabs, but they gagged and complained about it. As they got bigger and more bloodshot, the eyes locked on to me, never averting their gaze. It freaked me out.

Then they started to form little sprouts, like a weed. Little bony masses jutted out of the corneas. The eyes stopped blinking then. The sprouts eventually became small little… limbs.

Yes, limbs. The doctors were horrified. A nurse vomited when one of the eyeballs burst and retinal fluid soaked her scrub overalls. The limbs grew and grew until one day, the limbs became legs.

Legs that touched the ground like an arachnid.

I couldn’t control these limbs at all, but they were firm and hairy, almost like a tarantula’s. They twitched and jerked randomly, as if their nervous system wasn’t up and running completely, or as if they were somehow separate from my brain. I was petrified. The doctors injected me with morphine, and then they said they wanted to attempt something.

A full amputation.

They did the operation, and it seemed initially successful. Until they grew back.

They cut them off again, this time with hacksaws.

They grew back.

They burned them with a blowtorch.

They grew back.

They dissolved them in hydrochloric acid.

They grew back.

I’ve been here for over a year now. My girlfriend left me. She’s been calling me a freak on social media, and said I should join a circus. My family has disowned me. I get my weekly “removal” as I like to call it. Honestly though, the worst part isn’t the lumps themselves, it’s losing my humanity. My self worth, my human dignity, my normalcy.

Being stripped of my social life, shunned by my family, laughed at on social media by people who said they were my friends. No gifts, get well soon balloons, nothing. That’s the worst part of it all.

I don’t know where to go from here. I live in a hospital, I don’t even want to imagine how much medical debt I’ve racked up. It’s gotta be in the tens of millions. I feel like a lab rat unable to leave my cage. I can’t even wear a shirt anymore!

Hopefully I can get cured.

But I think we all know that’s not going to happen.

I’m going to die alone… a freak.