The narrator tells us that he's afraid he has spring fever. He's going to go to the Itoshik Clinic to get it checked out. The doctor is supposed to give him the medicine that supposedly cures the disease, but the narrator doesn't want to take the medicine because he thinks it's fake. The narrator says that the medicine works, but sometimes it just looks like it did work. Sometimes, he thinks, he'll just wear a sticker that says "It's OK, I'm feeling better" . He thinks that's like a mother saying to her child, "I'm going to make you feel better by making you feel healthier." The narrator thinks that the more he convinces himself of the positive effects of the medicine, the stronger it becomes. He says that if the medicine didn't really work, the narrator would be ashamed of himself for not knowing about the negative side effects. But if he convinced himself that it actually did work, he wouldn't have to worry about the bad side effects, since he'd be praised for it. He also thinks that if he were to tell anyone about it, they'd think he was lying about the effects of his medicine, since it was fake. So the narrator is being followed by someone who's trying to kill him. She's wearing a blue sweater that says, "She thinks she was hit by a curse from the first place, but there's really no such person. She thinks that this is a fake curse, but she's not. It's just the placebo effect, which means that the person who took the medicine had a different name.