The harsh, rhythmic sound echoed through the house in the dead of night—violent, desperate, nothing like a child’s game. Ten-year-old Ethan Brooks was slamming his casted arm against the corner of the wall, eyes wide and unfocused, his face twisted in pure terror. He wasn’t trying to hurt himself for attention. He was trying to escape something only he could feel.
“Get it off me—please! They’re moving. I can feel them crawling inside,” he screamed, his voice shredded from hours of crying. He shoved pencils, rulers, anything sharp into the narrow opening of the cast, clawing blindly at his skin until blood soaked the edges of the white plaster.
What was meant to heal him had become a prison.
The cast was cracked and filthy, worn down where Ethan struck it again and again. He couldn’t sit still, couldn’t sleep. He paced like a trapped animal, frantic and half-mad with pain. He begged for the bone to be broken again—anything to make the sensation stop.
To anyone else, his descriptions sounded like hallucinations: burning heat, biting pain, the sensation of tiny legs crawling under his skin. But to Ethan, it was real. Constant. Unbearable.